SAN DIEGO -- Barbara Levine went to sleep Oct. 21 believing she would get an automated phone call from the city's brand-new emergency notification system if a wildfire raging miles away threatened her home.

The call never came _ at least not before flames hopscotched into her suburban neighborhood, destroying her house and 372 others. Instead, a police officer who lived down the block knocked on her door at 5 a.m. and said it was time to flee.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Knights Templar, the medieval Christian military order accused of heresy and sexual misconduct, will soon be partly rehabilitated when the Vatican publishes trial documents it had closely guarded for 700 years.

A reproduction of the minutes of trials against the Templars, "'Processus Contra Templarios -- Papal Inquiry into the Trial of the Templars'" is a massive work and much more than a book -- with a 5,900 euros ($8,333) price tag.

"This is a milestone because it is the first time that these documents are being released by the Vatican, which gives a stamp of authority to the entire project," said Professor Barbara Frale, a medievalist at the Vatican's Secret Archives.

"Nothing before this offered scholars original documents of the trials of the Templars," she told Reuters in a telephone interview ahead of the official presentation of the work on October 25.

The epic comes in a soft leather case that includes a large-format book including scholarly commentary, reproductions of original parchments in Latin, and -- to tantalize Templar buffs -- replicas of the wax seals used by 14th-century inquisitors.

Reuters was given an advance preview of the work, of which only 799 numbered copies have been made.

One parchment measuring about half a meter wide by some two meters long is so detailed that it includes reproductions of stains and imperfections seen on the originals.

Pope Benedict will be given the first set of the work, published by the Vatican Secret Archives in collaboration with Italy's Scrinium cultural foundation, which acted as curator and will have exclusive world distribution rights.

al Reuters 

WASHINGTON – Dire "global warming" predictions are based on bad science from the very start, says a veteran meteorologist who found surface temperatures recorded throughout the U.S. are done so with almost no regard to scientific standards.

As a result of his shocking initial findings that temperature monitoring stations were constructed and placed without regard to achieving accurate recordings of natural temperatures, Anthony Watts set out to investigate the facilities used by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

What he found were temperature stations with sensors on the roofs of buildings, near air-conditioning exhaust vents, in parking lots near hot automobiles, barbecues, chimneys and on pavement and concrete surfaces – all of which would lead to higher temperature recordings than properly established conditions.

Aircraft parking within 10 feet of temperature sensor at Derby Field in Lovelock, Nev.

To qualify as a properly maintained temperature station, sensors must be placed in elevated, slatted boxes on flat ground surrounded by a clear surface on a slope of less than 19 degrees with surrounding grass and vegetations ground cover of less than 10 centimeters high. The sensors must be located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces and parking lots.

Watts' concerns about the temperatures being used to gauge whether global warming is actually taking place began when he read a 1997 study by the U.S. National Research Council that concluded the consistency and quality of temperature stations was "inadequate and deteriorating." Meanwhile, he learned, the U.S. Historical Climatological Network, responsible for maintaining the stations, was doing nothing to address the problems.

So Watts decided to take up the challenge himself. After surveying a few randomly chosen temperature stations and being shocked at the shortcomings, he set forth on a plan to survey all 1,221 stations, taking photographs along the way. With the help of volunteers, Watts has systematically surveyed one-third of the official weather stations.

The vast majority of the stations surveyed to date fail to meet the prescribed standards. Using a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 reflecting proper maintenance and standards and 5 representing facilities that are severely compromised, Watts says 70 percent of those stations surveyed received a 4 or 5 rating, while only 4 percent received a grade of 1.

All of the most egregious violations he has observed in the study would result in artificially higher temperatures being recorded.

World Net Daily

It is just one of the politically correct cuts Lindsey Gardiner says she has been told to make in case youngsters act out the stories.

As well as the scene showing her dragon toasting marshmallows with his breath, illustrations of an electric cooker with one element glowing red and of a boy on a ladder have had to go.

Ms Gardiner, 36, who has written and illustrated 15 internationally successful children's books, featuring her popular characters Lola, Poppy and Max, says such editing decisions are now common.

In Who Wants A Dragon? - published by Orchard Books last year - Ms Gardiner says: "I was told, 'You can't have the dragon breathing fire because it goes against health and safety.'

"It doesn't really make any sense.

"Sales and marketing departments are worried something might offend somebody, or that a child might copy something in a book and their parents will sue the publisher."

Pointing out that classic fairy tales such as Hansel And Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood would not get published today, Ms Gardiner said: 'It's a sad reflection of modern society."

In When Poppy And Max Grow Up, published by Orchard Books in 2001, Max was originally shown on a ladder "They didn't allow that because they thought it was precarious," said Ms Gardiner.

"Then I had to change the element on a cooker from glowing red to green.

"It is crazy. When I go to book signings, I sometimes take with me some colouring pictures, and the kids draw the elements as red because the cooker is on and it's hot. They are not stupid.

"I've had books published in Japan, France, Spain and Holland and they don't ask for the same changes.

"It seems to be in Britain and the U.S. that there are problems."

Nobody from Orchard Books was available for comment but a spokesman for the Publishers Association said: "We are aware of some concerns by authors and it is something we can talk about in the industry."

*Sigh*

Daily Mail 

Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.

Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said.

The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner's knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org, the bureau said.

The affected hard discs are Maxtor Basics 500G discs.

The bureau said that hard discs with such a large capacity are usually used by government agencies to store databases and other information.

Sensitive information may have already been intercepted by Beijing through the two Web sites, the bureau said.

The bureau said that the method of attack was unusual, adding that it suspected Chinese authorities were involved.

In recent years, the Chinese government has run an aggressive spying program relying on information technology and the Internet, the bureau said.

The bureau said this was the first time it had found that Trojan horse viruses had been placed on hard discs before they even reach the market.

The bureau said that it had instructed the product's Taiwanese distributor, Xander International, to remove the products from shelves immediately.

The bureau said that it first received complaints from consumers last month, saying they had detected Trojan horse viruses on brand new hard discs purchased in Taiwan.

Agents began examining hard discs on the market and found the viruses linked to the two Web sites.

Anyone who has purchased this kind of hard disc should return it to the place of purchase, the bureau said.

The distributor told the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister newspaper) that the company had sold 1,800 tainted discs to stores last month.

It said it had pulled 1,500 discs from shelves, while the remaining 300 had been sold by the stores to consumers.

Seagate's Asian Pacific branch said it was looking into the matter.

Just effing spiffy...

Taipei Times 

Intro by Joe D’Aleo, Icecap, CCM
I was privileged to work with John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel in the year before it became a reality and then for the first of the 6 years I was fortunate to be the Director of Meteorology. No one worked harder than John to make The Weather Channel a reality and to make sure the staffing, the information and technology was the very best possible at that time.  John currently works with KUSI in San Diego. He posts regularly. I am very pleased to present his latest insightful post.

By John Coleman

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmentally conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minute documentary segment.

I do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions of either party. However, Global Warming, i.e. Climate Change, is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you “believe in.” It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won’t believe a me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be it.

I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.

In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious. As the temperature rises, polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding and super storm pattern all fail to occur as predicted everyone will come to realize we have been duped. The sky is not falling. And, natural cycles and drifts in climate are as much if not more responsible for any climate changes underway. I strongly believe that the next twenty years are equally as likely to see a cooling trend as they are to see a warming trend.  See John’s full blog story here.. See John’s forecast blog on the KUSI site here.

ICECAP 

Safety equipment tab starts out at $367,000

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has announced that U.S. taxpayers will be footing the startup costs of a program to install satellite tracking technology on vehicles taking part in the Mexican Truck Demonstration Program.

The announcement confirmed the U.S. government would "initially spend approximately $367,000 to outfit all trucks from the United States and Mexico that take part in the program."

According to the administration, "the decision to require the installation of satellite tracking technology on trucks in the program was made after members of Congress expressed a desire to know whether participants are complying with federal safety and trade laws."

A key opponent of the program, and author of the language in the transportation appropriations bill to halt funding of the program, continued to express disappointment Barry Piatt, spokesman for Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., told WND, "It's an indication that they are going forward with the program, despite strong and pretty clear opposition from both chambers of Congress."

Congressman Duncan Hunter's office told WND he agrees. "The tracking technology, while a step in the right direction, does very little to ensure compliance with safety and security standards. The focus must remain on implementing reliable and enforceable standards that ensure Mexican truckers with access to U.S. roadways do not threaten the safety of vehicle motorists or America's security," explained Joe Kasper, spokesman for Hunter, R-Calif.

According to the FMCSA, the technology will help continue to ensure that trucks operating as part of the program are complying with the agency's rigorous safety standards and U.S. trade laws.

The FMCSA intends to use the information gathered from the equipment to ensure trucks comply with hours-of-service laws and rules that govern the trips into and out of the country. The GPS-based technology also will allow real-time tracking of truck location, documenting every international-border and state-line crossing. The equipment does not provide cargo information.

Absolute madness.  This Mexican trucking exodus is going to get a lot of innocent people killed...

World Net Daily

You don't have to be a Harvard University researcher to figure out that the media is infected with liberal bias — or to realize that some left-wing journalists will use any means necessary to create ideological narratives that fit their worldview. The Rathergate debacle at CBS News involving faked National Guard memos to smear President Bush was an extreme example. But if you look closely, you'll find everyday examples of Serious Journalists manufacturing the news and concocting social crises.

Amazingly, they always manage to make conservatives look racist, intolerant and evil. Funny how that works.

On Monday, the local Fox affiliate in Birmingham, Ala., blew the whistle on an ABC News sting operation intended to elicit bigoted responses from local residents. The national ABC News program "Primetime Live" hired actors to pose as same-sex couples and engage in public displays of affection on a park bench. Birmingham police department sources told the Fox affiliate about the social experiment; a local merchant spotted an RV where the ABC crew was stationed. The merchant was told "ABC was working on a week-long project to see how people would react . . . A FOX6 news reporter approached the RV and talked with an 'actor' who said, 'Yes, we are working for ABC News.'"

Welcome to Media Theatrics 101. Instead of simply interviewing folks in the South or staking out real gay couples, ABC News thinks it's fair and objective to stage-manage social experiments and call it journalism. Next thing you know, they'll hire celebrity prankster Ashton Kutcher to jump out and yell, "You just got Punk'd!" as passers-by get ensnared and — ABC News hopes — exhibit the signs of prejudice they are so sure exist in Southerners.

Does this politically correct set-up sound familiar? It should. Last spring, I exposed a similar news media production engineered by NBC's "Dateline," which recruited Muslim males to be sent to sports events and NASCAR races in the South and across the heartland to expose fans as anti-Muslim, anti-Arab bigots.

Yes, the same program and network that were humiliated for faking Does this politically correct set-up sound familiar? It should. Last spring, I exposed a similar news media production engineered by NBC's "Dateline," which recruited Muslim males to be sent to sports events and NASCAR races in the South and across the heartland to expose fans as anti-Muslim, anti-Arab bigots.

Yes, the same program and network that were humiliated for faking GM pick-up truck explosions attempted to manufacture another crisis to give "Dateline's" talking heads yet another opportunity to furrow their brows, shake their heads and win more Emmy awards.

My readers offered their own news sting ideas: "I wonder if they would consider sending a professor wearing an 'I Love W' button and an American flag pin into the faculty lounge at Harvard or some other liberal ivory tower with a hidden camera. I would love to see that experiment." "Perhaps when I get back from deployment, you can follow me around Seattle and see how I get treated wearing my Navy uniform . . . " "Why don't you set up some white guy with hidden cameras, put a George Bush T-Shirt on him and have him walk down a street in Pakistan. Or, better yet, have him walk down a street in Detroit. I'll just bet you could get a lot of bigoted reactions . . . " "Wear a pro-life T-shirt to a Women's Studies class." Or a "Marriage Is Between One Man, One Woman" T-shirt to The New York Times newsroom.

For many left-wing do-gooders in the media, the ideological end — exposing America as an irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, elitist nation — justifies these manufactured means. That destructive philosophy has manifested itself on countless college campuses, where professors and students alike have been caught cooking up fake hate crimes to show how racist our society is.

Direct hit by Michelle.  Go read the rest.

Creator's Syndicate

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, perhaps preparing to get back into the presidential ring one day, claims he's now armed with materials that will make war record critics from his 2004 presidential campaign go running tail between legs.

The 63-year-old Democratic senator told The Patriot-Ledger on Tuesday that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Navy servicemen who served with Kerry and criticized his record in Vietnam, will be revealed as liars.

"We have put together a documented portfolio that frankly puts their lies in such a total light of absurdity and indecency, that should they ever rear their ugly heads again, we have every single 't’ crossed and 'i’ dotted, and I welcome that in a sense,'' [ Faxed from a certain Kinko's in a certain little Texas town? -- ed.] Kerry said after addressing Boston's South Shore Chamber of Commerce. "It’s a shame we weren’t able to produce all that at the time.''

Click here to read the Patriot-Ledger article.

Kerry, who is up for re-election next year for a fifth term in the U.S. Senate, added that he regrets that he was slow to counter accusations against him during the 2004 presidential campaign, and thinks that Republicans have descended into pure deception to win votes. [That's called projection, you fucking elitist. 'member Dan's TANG memos??? -- ed.]

"I have no doubt at all that some of the people involved on the other side don’t care about the truth, think nothing about distorting it, will not hesitate to say and do whatever they think is necessary to win,'' Kerry told the newspaper. "But I think we are now much more prepared and savvy about those kind of things, and certainly in my own involvement, I will make certain that people don’t get away with that.''

He also said that it's unfortunate that "swift boating" has become a verb in the political vernacular.

"I hate to see the term become a negative term in American politics, it is what is is,'' he said. "Would those same tactics be used against people? Sure, absolutely.''

FOR years the United Nations attempted to cover up perverted and outrageous behaviour by uniformed and civilian personnel who have served in East Timor since 1999.

But as a new wave of more than 2000 UN-employed police and staff prepare to travel to the capital Dili, Sukehiro Hasegawa, the top UN official in East Timor, has acknowledged for the first time that the UN system failed to bring anyone to justice for crimes that included sex abuse of children and bestiality.

Among deeply religious East Timorese, the behaviour of a small number of the 18,000 UN personnel from 113 countries who have served in East Timor was spoken about only in whispers. But the UN establishment in New York was shocked when it received an internal report last month exposing a culture that covered up behaviour that enraged many UN staff, several of whom resigned in disgust.

The report revealed that peacekeepers left behind at least 20 babies they had fathered to Timorese women who are now stigmatised and in some cases ostracised by their communities.

It revealed that one UN peacekeeper from an unnamed country sexually abused two boys and two girls in the enclave of Oecussi, and in 2001, two Jordanian soldiers were evacuated home with injured penises after attempting sexual intercourse with goats.

 Excerpt from The Age

Captive market:  The sexual slave traffic in children

...Five hours later the Volvo reached its final destination. "Arizona Market" is on the outskirts of Kosovo. The town resembles the old Wild West rather than Central Europe in the Third Millennium. It is also the UN headquarters in Bosnia.

An area interlaced with muddy tracks lead to establishments with names like Café Marlboro, Café Don, and The Golden Heart. Fronted by heaps of refuse, used condoms and empty liquor bottles, they are brothels. Between them stand wooden huts selling cheap denim clothes, alcohol, perfume, and guns.

Inside the sleazy bars, the scene seldom changes: dimmed red lights, loud music, cheap drinks -- and semi-naked girls. Usually they are draped over the men known as "the internationalists". These are the soldiers of the United Nations multi-national peace keeping force. In 2003, it consisted of 45,000 soldiers drawn from 39 countries. In addition, there were some 7,000 UN staff as well as members of over 200 Western aid agencies.

Many of the girls appear to be drugged -- and not only from the ready supply of cocaine and heroin on open sale.

An American aid agency worker said: "Lookit, the bar owners who bought these girls like to keep them nice and quiet. So they buy drugs from some of the UN medics to do so. When a girl has finished her shift, she is taken to her room by a bar man and given a shot. When she wakes up she is ready for her next shift".

This is Arizona Market. Officially established by the peacekeeping forces to foster trade between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, today its five square miles is the epicenter of Bosnia's booming sex-slaves trade.

Canada Free Press 

I post these as just a few examples of the UN using children for sex slaves, in response to a request for citations by TheRockSays.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2007) — The widely accepted (albeit unproven) theory that manmade global warming will accelerate itself by creating more heat-trapping clouds is challenged this month in new research from The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Instead of creating more clouds, individual tropical warming cycles that served as proxies for global warming saw a decrease in the coverage of heat-trapping cirrus clouds, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville's Earth System Science Center.

That was not what he expected to find.

"All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases," he said. "That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space."

"While low clouds have a predominantly cooling effect due to their shading of sunlight, most cirrus clouds have a net warming effect on the Earth," Spencer said. With high altitude ice clouds their infrared heat trapping exceeds their solar shading effect.

In the tropics most cirrus-type clouds flow out of the upper reaches of thunderstorm clouds. As the Earth's surface warms - due to either manmade greenhouse gases or natural fluctuations in the climate system - more water evaporates from the surface. Since more evaporation leads to more precipitation, most climate researchers expected increased cirrus cloudiness to follow warming.

"To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Spencer said. "The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming."

The only way to see how these new findings impact global warming forecasts is to include them in computerized climate models.

"The role of clouds in global warming is widely agreed to be pretty uncertain," Spencer said. "Right now, all climate models predict that clouds will amplify warming. I'm betting that if the climate models' 'clouds' were made to behave the way we see these clouds behave in nature, it would substantially reduce the amount of climate change the models predict for the coming decades."

The UAHuntsville research team used 30- to 60-day tropical temperature fluctuations - known as "intraseasonal oscillations" - as proxies for global warming.

"Fifteen years ago, when we first started monitoring global temperatures with satellites, we noticed these big temperature fluctuations in the tropics," Spencer said. "What amounts to a decade of global warming routinely occurs in just a few weeks in the tropical atmosphere. Then, as if by flipping a switch, the rapid warming is replaced by strong cooling. It now looks like the change in cirrus cloud coverage is the major reason for this switch from warming to cooling."

The team analyzed six years of data from four instruments aboard three NASA and NOAA satellites. The researchers tracked precipitation amounts, air and sea surface temperatures, high and low altitude cloud cover, reflected sunlight, and infrared energy escaping out to space.

When they tracked the daily evolution of a composite of fifteen of the strongest intraseasonal oscillations they found that although rainfall and air temperatures would be rising, the amount of infrared energy being trapped by the cloudy areas would start to decrease rapidly as the air warmed. This unexpected behavior was traced to the decrease in cirrus cloud cover.

The new results raise questions about some current theories regarding precipitation, clouds and the efficiency with which weather systems convert water vapor into rainfall. These are significant issues in the global warming debate.

"Global warming theory says warming will generally be accompanied by more rainfall," Spencer said. "Everyone just assumed that more rainfall means more high altitude clouds. That would be your first guess and, since we didn't have any data to suggest otherwise ..."

There are significant gaps in the scientific understanding of precipitation systems and their interactions with the climate, he said. "At least 80 percent of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems.

"Until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming, I don't believe we can know how much of our current warming is manmade. Without that knowledge, we can't predict future climate change with any degree of certainty."

Spencer and his colleagues expect these new findings to be controversial.

"I know some climate modelers will say that these results are interesting but that they probably don't apply to long-term global warming," he said. "But this represents a fundamental natural cooling process in the atmosphere. Let's see if climate models can get this part right before we rely on their long term projections."

The results of this research were published recently  in the American Geophysical Union's "Geophysical Research Letters" on-line edition. The paper was co-authored by UAHuntsville's Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. W. Danny Braswell, and Dr. Justin Hnilo of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA.

Science Daily 

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Hillary Clinton's rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination are accusing her of delaying the release of records from her husband's administration, something the front-runner and President Clinton have denied.

"We have just gone through one of the most secretive administrations in our history. And not releasing, I think, these records at the same time, Hillary, that you're making the claim that this is the basis for your experience, I think, is a problem," Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, charged during a presidential debate Tuesday.

But Clinton, who represents New York, said the release of the records are not up to her or former President Clinton but the archivists at the National Archives

"The archives is moving as rapidly as the archives moves,"(sic) [What. The. Fuck?  "Smartest Woman in the World™ -- ed.]  Clinton said when asked about the documents by the debate moderator, NBC's Tim Russert. "They are releasing as they do their process. And I am fully in favor of that."

The Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, contains 78 million pages of documents and 20 million e-mail messages, said spokeswoman Susan Cooper.

The library has about 300 outstanding Freedom of Information Act requests for Clinton documents, totaling 10 million pages, and has six archivists to handle them, Cooper said.

"Each request requires thousands of pages to look through to see if they're responsive." Cooper said. "Those that are may be classified and may deal with personal privacy, so we're up against an enormous task."

"The first request was on UFOs, and we can't decide which one to handle first," Cooper added.

And you lefties can seriously consider electing this woman?

Source: CNN