Trump’s cabinet

August 15, 2015

A US Presidential election is one of my entertainment highlights. But next year it runs the risk of becoming an exceedingly boring affair if it becomes “another Clinton, another Bush”. But it could be the most entertaining ever if Trump is there as the GOP candidate or as an independent (and the GOP risks becoming obsolete if Trump runs as an independent). The silent majority of the “fed up” – not just Republicans but in the country – could be big enough to bring in the clowns.

But what could be even more entertaining than such an election would be watching Trump choose his cabinet as the President of the US. I can just see him interviewing prospective candidates – and who wouldn’t be a fly on the wall for those interviews. Imagine if he makes that all part of a reality show. “The West Wing” would be eclipsed. Imagine if viewers/voters could ring in to express support or rejection of a Foreign Secretary or Defense Secretary? Then the top 50 in his administration (by annual salary including bonuses) would be subject to a monthly performance review with Key Performance Indicators being published. The lowest performer each month would be fired  – on live Television of course.

If one pays any attention to the nonsense speculation (here for example) we could have a cabinet which included

  • Kim Kardashian, Vice President
  • Sarah Palin, Secretary of (?) Defense
  • Trey Gowdy, Attorney General
  • Ron Paul, Fed Chairman
  • Jesse Ventura, Secretary of State
  • Ivanka Trump, Secretary of the Treasury
  • Carlos Irwin Estevez (Charlie Sheen), Secretary of Health and Human Services
  • Omarosa Manigault, CoS
  • Warren Buffet, Henry Kravis, Jack Welch, and Carl Icahn, would be senior advisors and members of his selection/interview panel.

John McCain would not be invited.

Foreign policy under Trump could be fascinatingly simple. Mexico would be made to pay for building the wall. He would “bomb the hell out of Iraq and ISIS” and take over Iraqi oil – “We shouldn’t be there but since we are, we should take the oil”. A Twitter war would be started with Iran. Israel would be a US friend on Facebook. Palestine would be defriended. China would be fined for hacking and forced to accept a Trump Hotels franchise in all major cities.

It is not clear if Las Vegas will replace the White House or Camp David.

But that is all just fantasy – maybe wishful thinking. I am resigned to “another Clinton another Bush” and potentially the most boring US Presidential election in my lifetime.

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A year without summer in the Cairngorms and in the highlands of Lapland

August 15, 2015

It is successive cool summers and the persistence of snow and ice from one winter to the next which will cause the next little ice age. Of course the absence of summer in the highlands of Lapland and Scotland in 2015 does not necessarily mean that an ice age is upon us. But in the language of “climate science” (which is no science), it is entirely consistent with the coming of an ice age.

This year we have had a fairly miserable summer in Sweden but in the highlands of Lapland, conditions have gone directly from a “meteorological spring” to “meteorological autumn”. And even in the Scottish Cairngorms snow from last winter is still persisting and creating some impressive sculptures as it melts.

Telegraph: Low summer temperatures mean snow continues to cling to the mountainsides of the Scottish National Park, even in the middle of August. But as the patches begin to melt from below, and water flows downhill, vast caverns – some big enough to walk through – are formed.

These striking pictures were captured by Helen Rennie at Ciste Mhearad in the northern Cairngorms.

Melting snow leaves behind magical frozen caves in Scotland

Helen Rennie at Ciste Mhearad Photo: Helen Rennie

In Lapland, the highlands have officially skipped summer and gone directly from spring to autumn conditions.

Swedish Radio:

There was no summer this year in the Tarfala highlands of northern Lapland. They have gone from meteorologic spring to autumn without going through any summer according to the temperatures says SMHI meteorologist Sandra Andersson. “If the summer has not formally come by 1st August we can go directly to autum instead and so it was for Tarfala” says Sandra Andersson.

How common is it to skip a season? “In the highlands it happens occasionally. Even Falsterbo in Skåne (southern Sweden) have sometimes skipped winter but it is not so common”. 

Even in Stekenjokk in the southern highlands of Lapland it is is now officially autumn, which means that the average temperature during the day after 1st August did not exceed ten degrees for five days in a row. 

Kebnekaises sydtopp. Foto: Stockholms universitet.

Southern top of Kebnekaise Foto: Stockholms universitet.

 

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Weather, Winter | 1 Comment »

EC conditions for GE’s acquisition of Alstom will probably sacrifice Swiss jobs

August 14, 2015

UPDATE! 14th August

Reuters reports “exclusively” – and no doubt from anonymous EU bureaucrats as their sources – that the EC is set to approve the GE/ Alstom deal. The EC decision will be announced by 11th September. The report suggests that GE was prepared to accept the divestment of PSM and of a “facility” in Switzerland. That probably consists of some or all of the gas turbine R & D operations at Baden/Birr. The precise scope of the GE concessions are not yet revealed.

The French government, is probably not too perturbed by what happens to Swiss jobs or to PSM jobs in the US. And the price to be paid by Ansaldo probably compensates for most of the reduction that Alstom has accepted in the price to be paid by GE. In fact Alstom, the French government and Bouygues are all probably quite relieved to now see their way clear to financial closure.

Alstom management will also be quite glad to get rid of the difficult task of controlling “fortress” Baden. Whether GE for part, and the Italians or the Chinese for the rest, are up to that task is another matter.

Ansaldo (with Shanghai Electric) has emerged as the unlikely saviour of the gas turbine R & D tradition at Baden/Birr in Switzerland. But whether under GE ownership or in some hive-off to Ansaldo, it is only logical that many jobs in Switzerland would shift either to France or to Italy. One estimate puts the job losses to be expected in Baden to be around 600. I would expect the number to be very much larger. As far as the European Commision is concerned they may be making the calculation that more jobs will shift to Italy with Ansaldo ownership than would have shifted to France under GE ownership.

Job losses in Switzerland, of course, will not weigh very heavy with the EC in any case, and especially not if they were to shift to France or Italy. The EC may be calculating that Ansaldo could manage and run an R & D facility at Baden. I am not very optimistic about Ansaldo’s ability to be a technology owner. Shanghai Electric is more credible for that. My personal opinion is that Ansaldo has not the management strength or the R & D traditions to be able to manage an R&D program in Switzerland. (I note that even after a wholesale influx of French personnel, Alstom had its difficulties to manage Baden). On the other hand, any jobs which shift from the long and rich R & D traditions of Baden to Genoa will effectively be R & D which comes to an end. If the focus of development of an “Ansaldo” sequential combustion engine shifts to Italy, I would go so far as to forecast that it will never happen.

If this focus shifts to Shanghai instead, it will take a very long time but the development will eventually happen. With Shanghai Electric providing the “deep pockets” for Ansaldo, I suspect that jobs shifting to Italy will only be as a stop along the way to China.

HandelsZeitung:

Alstom Switzerland: 600 jobs in the balance

General Electric wants the energy division of Alstom.This could have a major impact on the Swiss workforce. Unions say that up to ten percent of the people have to go.

……. According to reports, GE will therefore sell its gas turbine business – the heart of Alstom Switzerland. The buyer would be the publicly listed energy company Ansaldo, a subsidiary of the Italian industrial group Finmeccanica. “Ansaldo is expected to shift the business to Genoa,” says a trade unionist. 

………… On 11 September, the Commission will announce a decision. “The closing of the deal in the second half of 2015 remains our goal,” said GE spokesman Bernd Eitel. 

For the EC, sacrificing Swiss jobs ostensibly for the benefit of any EU country is probably positive. But what about sacrificing Swiss jobs and an R & D tradition for the benefit of Shanghai?

Disclaimer: I should note that I own a few shares in GE and in Alstom but not enough to influence even my own opinions. I own no shares in “Baden” but I have a huge respect and admiration for the R & D work done at Baden as BBC and then as ABB and even later under Alstom ownership. Baden has been less impressive as a role-model for good management practice.

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Posted in Behaviour, Business, Energy, Engineering, Technology | 1 Comment »

Mann is “A disgrace to the profession” – as “climate science” is a disgrace to “science”

August 14, 2015

I am waiting for my Kindle edition of Mark Steyn’s “A disgrace to the profession” which is only available on 1st September from Amazon. Something to look forward to.

If “the profession” is supposed to be  “climate science” then this so-called “science” – having no falsifiable hypotheses – is itself a disgrace. But certainly Michael Mann is classified and gets paid as a “scientist” and as an “academic”. And to both those classes, Mann is an embarrassment and a disgrace. His construction of the “hockey stick” was not just invalid and unjustified, it was close to fraud. (The Hockey Stick Illusion). But the gullibility of those who have swallowed the illusion without application of mind or any other critical judgement is also a disgrace to sentience.

WUWT has a review of this compilation of what other scientists have to say about Michael Mann’s work on the “hockey stick”.

WUWT:

I remember when Mann decided to sue NRO and Steyn for defamation, and despite all the laughing at the time there was this prescient thought from Dr. Judith Curry:

“Mark Steyn is formidable opponent. I suspect that this is not going to turn out well for you.”

Well, Part 1, or should I say, Volume 1 of that prediction is now in press. It’s a scorcher, hilarity, and a tale of science and politics gone awry all in one.

Steyn realized the word of a political pundit like himself can only travel so far in certain circles, and in a brilliant move, he has gathered a compendium of what other scientists have to say about Mann’s work on the “hockey stick”. And of course, he’s had it illustrated by Josh. My favorite is Mann as Yoda, wielding a hockey stick rather than a light saber, seen in this collage below:

If Michael Mann is a disgrace to a profession which itself is a disgrace, it is not a case of one disgrace cancelling the other, but a case of Mann being doubly disgraced.

 

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When the models fail, just “homogenise” the data

August 13, 2015

Jennifer Marohasy has another example from Australia of how climate data is changed under the guise of “homogenisation” or “adjustments” or “corrections”. Raw temperature data showing a cooling trend are “fixed” to match the religious beliefs of the global warming crowd (or should it be the global warming mob?)

……….

More recently, the Bureau has been claiming that it had to change the temperatures at Rutherglen because they were different from temperatures at near-by locations.  Of course, a real scientist wouldn’t tamper with data because it showed an unusual trend.   Rather the unusual result might be investigated.

But not the Bureau.  It changes the trend at Rutherglen so it matches neighboring stations, but only after first changing the trend at neighboring stations so it matches the global warming trend.

In protest I’ve sent an email to the CEO, Vicki Middleton.

Dear Ms Middleton,

Re: Deniliquin shows statistically significant cooling, Rutherglen just shows cooling

I am writing to request that you correct a Bureau of Meteorology fact sheet*, which shows remodelled (homogenized) data for Wagga, Deniliquin and Kerang with actual physical temperature measurements (raw data) for Rutherglen.

Several members of the public, seeking clarification regarding adjustments to the temperature record for Rutherglen, have been advised by you in recent correspondence that the adjustments at Rutherglen are necessary to make temperature trends at Rutherglen more consistent with neighboring sites.   In particular, you have directed them to this fact sheet* that shows minimum temperatures at Rutherglen cooling, while temperatures at Wagga, Deniliquin and Kerang are warming.  What you have failed to point out, however, is that the Wagga, Deniliquin and Kerang series represent homogenized time series.   That is, the data have been substantially remodelled.

 

CHART3-WITH EXPLAINATION-Ver2

There is no single, long, continuous, raw minimum temperature record from the same site for either Kerang or Wagga.   Recordings were made at Wilkinson Street, Deniliquin, from February 1867 to June 2003, providing a record comparable in length to the raw series from Rutherglen.

I have plotted the raw temperature series for three Deniliquin locations below, including the data from Wilkinson Street from 1913, which is when the Rutherglen series begins.

Chart3-Revised-Deni-Rutherglen

The top green squiggly line represents data from Wilkinson Street, Deniliquin, the short purple squiggle is data from the airport at Deniliquin, and the mustard-colored squiggle is from a site referred to as Falkiner Memorial, Deniliquin.

Also shown in this chart are both homogenized and raw data for Rutherglen, as the red and blue squiggly lines, respectively.

The three dotted-lines represent the linear trends from Wilkinson Street (green), the raw (blue) series for Rutherglen, and the homogenized (red) series for Rutherglen.

The cooling trend in the Wilkinson Street, Deniliquin series of 0.6 degree Celsius per century is statistically significant (p<0.05).

I appreciate that you may have been misled by your employees into believing that the cooling trend at Rutherglen (represented by the blue line in the above chart) is erroneous.   This is not the case.

I recognize that this cooling trend evident in the minimum temperature record for much of the twentieth century at many rural locations in south eastern Australia is inconsistent with official Australian and also global trends.   Nevertheless, it does appear to be real, and is statistically significant for some locations.   Of course, real scientists are concerned with the interpretation of real data, rather than remodeling to generate constructs that fit popular political agendas.

Yours sincerely,
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD
Independent Scientist

9th August, 2015

Copy Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council.

*The following document is cited in Bureau correspondence as a Fact Sheet:

Bureau of Meteorology, 2014. ACORN-SAT station adjustment summary – Rutherglen (as at 24 September 2014), Accessed 8 August 2015. http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/documents/station-adjustment-summary-Rutherglen.pdf

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IKEA murder suspect a rejected asylum seeker from Eritrea

August 13, 2015

Sometimes, it seems, misguided, institutional obsessions with “human rights” leads to common sense being abandoned. Surely it cannot be that the freedom to behave irrationally and kill people is considered a “human right”?

  • Why would an “asylum seeker” whose application had been rejected and who had been served with a deportation order be expected to behave in a rational manner?
  • Why would a person with a high risk of behaving in an irrational manner be quite free to wander into an IKEA store, pick up some knives and kill two quite unrelated, innocent people?

The Local:

Monday’s attack saw a mother and her adult son stabbed to death at a store in the central town of Västerås, with police arresting two Eritrean asylum seekers. One of the suspects, a 35-year-old man, was found at the scene with serious knife injuries while the second, aged 23, was waiting at a bus stop outside Ikea.

According to Aftonbladet’s website, the images appear to show that the perpetrator was the injured Eritrean who was evacuated to hospital in critical condition. The footage shows a man grabbing two knives from the kitchenware section “several seconds before the murder”, then attacking the two shoppers, a 55-year-old woman and her 28-year-old son, the paper said. “The attack ends when the alleged murderer stabs himself in the stomach,” it said.

…….. Swedish media reports said on Wednesday that the injured man had been handed a deportation order which would have returned him to Italy. The day before the attack he had met with immigration officials in Västerås to discuss his case, the reports said.

It is not clear what role the second man arrested played.

What were they thinking? Presumably the prime suspect had a right to appeal the deportation decision. Would it really have been an infringement of his human rights to curtail his freedom to behave irrationally?

 

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Oracular Google – believe in yourself with pdf as the new religion

August 12, 2015
Oracular Google

Oracular Google

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Entropy of belief will keep increasing in a post-religion world

August 12, 2015

If the space of ignorance is infinite then increasing knowledge cannot reduce the real extent of the space of ignorance. However, whether the space of ignorance is infinite or not, increasing our quantum of knowledge always increases the perimeter of what we know that we don’t know.

The space of ignorance

Belief and faith can only exist in the space of ignorance. Whether the human psyche needs to have beliefs – which by definition are in the realm of ignorance – is an open question. I strongly suspect that humans do need to make some assumptions – call them beliefs – about areas of behaviour and motivation and appreciation, the reasons for which lie in the space of ignorance.  However, it is not clear to me that these assumptions are necessary to live our lives. I “believe” that they do help in achieving a better “quality” of life – but even that is just a belief – an assumption in my space of ignorance. The level of “beliefs” that any individual needs, I think, must vary with the individual.

Religions exist as an organised set of beliefs in the space of ignorance. Organised religions take it upon themselves to impose those set of beliefs on their followers and even to expand the numbers of their followers. Followers can argue interminably about the superiority of their particular ignorances over the ignorance of others. This applies to their gods as well. “My unknown god is better than your unknown god” maps to “My ignorance is better than your ignorance”.

In a post-religion world I expect that we would have moved beyond “organised religions” where sets of beliefs are imposed on others. “Freedom of choice of religion” would come to its logical conclusion to become “freedom of belief”. I can see that individuals would be free to select which beliefs or sets of beliefs they preferred to use as assumptions. They would be free to mix and match components from different belief sets – as it suited them or they judged to be beneficial for their own lives. They would be free to change their beliefs at will. After all they would merely be swapping one item of ignorance for another.

But my point is that the human psyche needs to make assumptions about the unknown (whether unknowable or not). The choice of these beliefs influence our values and then our behaviour our aesthetics and our motivations. The need for such assumptions/beliefs will not reduce in a post-religion world. But our selection of these beliefs will be less constrained. Sets of belief will not be as rigidly enforced by “organised religions”. We will choose those that suit as. Individuals may choose to believe in reincarnation if they wish to; or in the Daughter of God if they prefer or in no god at all. They can believe in a God of Dark Energy or his Son, the God of Dark Matter in an infinite Universe with a Paradise – or a Hades – lying beyond. There will be more beliefs than ever before – all in the space of ignorance. Maybe the Law is that the entropy of belief can only increase.

But there will still be psychopaths and sociopaths who will try to impose their particular ignorant assumptions on others

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Posted in Philosophy, Religion | 1 Comment »

Is the current Pope a post-Catholic?

August 12, 2015

From the Spectator regarding an article about Pope John Paul II :

‘Correction of the day’ goes to the Times for an apology which brings new meaning to the age-old question ‘is the Pope Catholic?’

Buried on the paper’s letters page is a gem of an apology concerning an article they ran about Karol Wojtyla, the first non-Italian Pope since the Dutch Pope Adrian VI, who served from 1522 to 1523.

non-catholic pope

The current Pope is also a non-Italian and may have moved beyond Catholicism. His brand of populist religion might make him the first example of a post-Catholic – or should it be a post-modern Catholic?

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Why would anybody trust the EPA?

August 11, 2015

CBS News: The Environmental Protection Agency is taking the blame for a huge leak of contaminated water into a Colorado river. Government officials said Sunday three million gallons spilled into the Animas River. That is three times larger than the original estimate. The once-clean waterway that was a popular place for kayakers is now filled with yellow, contaminated water.

EPA says arsenic and other toxins from mine spill have traveled 100 miles through Colorado and New Mexico

Three million gallons of toxic waste are now pushing down two rivers that cross Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

Last Wednesday a crew working for the Environmental Protection Agency accidentally breached a dam holding back heavy metals used in gold mining. Colorado’s governor declared a disaster.

EPA caused pollution colorado August 2015 - cbs news

EPA caused pollution colorado August 2015 – cbs news

The EPA had no alternative to taking the blame. After all they did do it. A scapegoat will no doubt be found but no EPA heads will roll.

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