Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

~~~

~~~

Sunday, February 14, 2010

LET'S MOVE!

Believe it or not, there are some people who find  Mrs. Obama's campaign to get American children to eat healthier foods and to exercise more unAmerican and not relevant.  Somehow, these people believe that because this nation is involved in fighting terrorism, the FLOTUS should not waste time and effort to get us to do something about childhood obesity, which is now an epidemic in this country.

But the reality behind the criticism is this:  No matter what anyone in the Obama White House does, even if it is something to make American children healthier, someone, somewhere in Ihateobamastan will find a reason to denigrate and trash the effort.

This is sick, and it is emblematic of the times we live in.  This nation is so divided and so paranoid that even helping children to become healthy is now seen as some sort of commie plot.

Here is Mrs. Obama speaking about the program "Let's Move."  You decide how this in any way takes away from this country's efforts to fight terrorism:



And here is Mrs. Obama's speech, where nowhere does she say childhood obesity is more of a danger to this country than terrorism.  Nowhere.

34 comments:

Radicle Redneck said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
dmarks said...

I wonder if the same folks who hate her for this are the ones who make blog posts about the size of her bottom and equate her looks with those of certain primates. I'm no big fan of the First Lady for several reasons, I can't find anything to criticizer her over about this effort.

And I would not be surprised if someone hasn't already come up with a list of conservative governors/etc involved with similar fitness efforts in their state, which would illustrate the pointlessness of criticizing Michelle Obama over this one thing.

Anonymous said...

Several reasons? Do tell. I can't wait to hear this.

Craig Bardo said...

Ha Ha Global Warming!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

Shaw Kenawe said...

CB,

One guy in England doesn't change the fact that the last decade was the warmest on record.

By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: January 21, 2010

WASHINGTON — The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show.

The agency also found that 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.


Source

Arthurstone said...

2010 Ha. Ha. global warming.

1960 Ha. Ha. Smoking cigarettes causes cancer.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Head in the sand is the default setting for far too many people.

Craig Bardo said...

Shaw,

One guy?!!!!

Are you kidding? Do you know who this "one guy" is? He's the "one guy" who built the whole fraud! Did you read how the planet has not warmed since 1995! This completely blows up the model. The original data - gone! The "hockey stick" data - gone! The Himalayas melting - fraud! The polar ice cap melting - fraud! India has dropped out of the IPCC saying they are not participating in propaganda any more. It is a complete hoax, a farce and a fraud that your 6th grade science teacher could have warned you off of!

The first clue to the fraud is someone wanting to control what you do and rush in order to save the planet! Second clue, the supposed answer to stop all these supposed bad effects from happening - redistribution of wealth! The left is so damn predictable but it imploded on them when they didn't get their deal at Copenhagen.

There is no easy way to come down off this shelf. You've been had, you've been took. You've been bamboozled! Led astray, run amok!

Arthurstone said...

On the other hand what better way 'to control what you do' (there's a painful phrase) than to launch a 'global war on terror'? An unending war against a constantly shifting and totally amorphous enemy?

Bamboozled is right.

libhom said...

I love it when people actually take anything seriously from a sleazy scandal sheet like the Daily Mail.

Shaw Kenawe said...

CB,

You're welcome to your opinion and your disbelief in global warming.

Scientific Consensus on Global Warming:

Worldwide, every major scientific agency or institution that studies climate, oceans or the atmosphere agrees that the global climate is warming rapidly and the primary cause is greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity. Even a short list would include such notable organizations as:

•National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
•National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
•NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
•Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
•The Royal Society of the UK (RS)
•Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)
•Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)


Business and Industry Acknowledge Global Warming
It’s not only the majority of scientists and politicians who accept the reality of human-caused global warming. Leading businesses across all industries also acknowledge the problem of global warming.

The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an unprecedented alliance between corporate executives and environmental groups that launched in January 2007 has proposed a federal cap-and-trade program that would cut greenhouse-gas emissions 60 percent to 80 percent by mid-century.

Even more telling, perhaps, are the positions taken by some oil companies.

BP, the largest oil company in the UK and one of the largest in the world, has this to say about global warming:

“There is an increasing consensus that climate change is linked to the consumption of carbon based fuels and that action is required now to avoid further increases in carbon emissions as the global demand for energy increases.”

And Shell Oil says:

“Shell shares the widespread concern that the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities is leading to changes in the global climate.”

Conclusion
To make the case that global warming is a hoax, someone would have to believe that environmentalists and political liberals control businesses and industries worldwide as well as the legislative bodies and scientific institutions of every developed nation in the world. That would be a hard case to make.

Source

IMO, it is YOU, CB, who is being had:

Why Big Business wants you to believe global warming is a hoax
Do not be fooled into thinking that just because Big Government is grabbing power that CO2 emissions have no impact on the environment. Those who say global warming is a hoax are essentially declaring that mankind can pollute the atmosphere without consequence. This position serves the financial interests of the coal companies and coal-burning power plants, of course, who don't want to have to spend the money to clean up their emissions. It also happens to be the position of Big Business, which wants to pollute the planet without limitation.

The big chemical polluters in modern society are using well-known techniques of disinformation and distraction to try to convince people that polluting the air with CO2 emissions is harmless. This is the same position as the dental industry claiming mercury fillings are harmless, or Big Pharma claiming their pharmaceuticals have no impact on the water supply. Throughout the history of modern civilization, big corporate polluters have always claimed their chemicals are harmless and have no effect on the planet.


Source

Craig Bardo said...

"Professor Phil Jones, who is at the centre of the “Climategate” affair, conceded that there has been no “statistically significant” rise in temperatures since 1995.
The admission comes as new research casts serious doubt on temperature records collected around the world and used to support the global warming theory.
Researchers said yesterday that warming recorded by weather stations was often caused by local factors rather than global change."
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/158214

Himalayan Melting: How a Climate Panel Got It Wrong

Moreover the head of the IPCC covered it up until it was more convenient
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1955405,00.html#ixzz0fcPPjCw3
Source Time Magazine Jan. 21, 2010

The University of Illinois is the world authority on polar ice - there has been no difference in polar ice in the last half century according to them http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

The IPCC admits lying about Dutch sea level

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61C1V420100213

African crops lie!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7231386/African-crops-yield-another-catastrophe-for-the-IPCC.html


Sine the Mail was an unacceptable source, how about Reuters, the IPCC itself, The BBC, The University of Illinois, etc.

I can go on but you've been bamboozled. You should find out why, so that it doesn't happen to you again. You're like my wife's friend's mother who continues to bankrupt her family by sending money to Nigerian scammers because she says, the Lord told her to do it. You need to get hold of that before someone has you committed.

Shaw Kenawe said...

CB wrote:

"You need to get hold of that before someone has you committed."

I don't mind your coming here and giving me your opinions and links on global warming/climate change to back them up. I think that's a good thing.

But you need to control your need to label me crazy just because I agree with NASA, NOAA, and NASA's Goddard Institue on Space Studies, among other reputable institutions, who do NOT agree that global warming/climate change is not happening.

You cheapen anything of value you have to say when you use ad hominem attacks on me to try to prove your point.

NASA resource on climate change

PS. CB, my mother, bless her-- she's gone, suffered from a severe mental illness and had to be committed, and, as a result, our family suffered dearly.

I don't think jokes about committing people are funny, anymore than jokes about sick children are funny either.

Anonymous said...

Ok Shaw,

I apologize, I meant no harm. My own son was committed for a short time.

The case was always specious. It ignored the effect of the sun, took measurements from the surface, instead of the atmosphere where warming would show up but even the surface temps show cooling, not warming. In 6th grade you learned that we breathe in oxygen and exhale CO2. Plants need CO2 for photosynthesis.

There is a close relationship between these folks and socialists that is well documented. Their "solutions are always to set government in control to force behavior change and then to redistribute income! How is a tax on wealth producers going to keep the waters from rising or polar bears from ( chuckle, snicker) drowning?

Aside from the fraud, cover ups, lost or destroyed "original data" I mock to shame people into using common sense. If these guys did not permit peer review (and they didn't), talked among themselves about the data not showing warming (emails revealed that they did) and don't take into account the warming that occurred following ice ages, got wrong the fact that CO2 is a trailing indicator, not a leading indicator and never acknowledge the role of the most powerful environmental factor in the solar system - solar activity, then how do you take it seriously?!!!

This thing was a charade that stank from the start, now, whether you know it or not, these people have been exposed, the game is up, it's over. Those like me, who are hunters and fishermen are mostly conservationists. We have been at the forefront of clean air and clean water initiatives but this stuff is a socialist plot pulled together by academia, lest you think it a prejorative use, my father is an academic (though not a climate "scientst"), government control types in collusion with a complicit media. The UK, New Zealand and Canadian press are way out ahead of the US media who is still hoping for crap and tax or EPA action and a victory for Obama.

I could go on bit it's hard from my iPhone and I need to work out and then expand my carbon footprint.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Apologies accepted, and I wish your son well.

Now here are rebuttals to what you've posted:

"IPCC errors: facts and spin

Filed under: Climate Science Communicating Climate

IPCCReporting on climateskeptics— group @ 14 February 2010

Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science.

[skip]

Media distortions

To those familiar with the science and the IPCC’s work, the current media discussion is in large part simply absurd and surreal. Journalists who have never even peeked into the IPCC report are now outraged that one wrong number appears on page 493 of Volume 2.

We’ve met TV teams coming to film a report on the IPCC reports’ errors, who were astonished when they held one of the heavy volumes in hand, having never even seen it. They told us frankly that they had no way to make their own judgment; they could only report what they were being told about it. And there are well-organized lobby forces with proper PR skills that make sure these journalists are being told the “right” story.

That explains why some media stories about what is supposedly said in the IPCC reports can easily be falsified simply by opening the report and reading.

Unfortunately, as a broad-based volunteer effort with only minimal organizational structure the IPCC is not in a good position to rapidly counter misinformation.

One near-universal meme of the media stories on the Himalaya mistake was that this was “one of the most central predictions of the IPCC” – apparently in order to make the error look more serious than it was. However, this prediction does not appear in any of the IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers, nor in the Synthesis Report (which at least partly explains why it went unnoticed for years). None of the media reports that we saw properly explained that Volume 1 (which is where projections of physical climate changes belong) has an extensive and entirely valid discussion of glacier loss."

The rest of the rebuttal is here.

Shaw Kenawe said...

This post is about Mrs. Obama's initiative "Let's Move!" but has developed into a discussion on climaate change/global warming.

Here is more rebuttal to what CB presented:

Is climate science sound?

In some media reports the impression has been given that even the fundamental results of climate change science are now in question, such as whether humans are in fact changing the climate, causing glacier melt, sea level rise and so on. The IPCC does not carry out primary research, and hence any mistakes in the IPCC reports do not imply that any climate research itself is wrong.

A reference to a poor report or an editorial lapse by IPCC authors obviously does not undermine climate science. Doubting basic results of climate science based on the recent claims against the IPCC is particularly ironic since none of the real or supposed errors being discussed are even in the Working Group 1 report, where the climate science basis is laid out.

To be fair to our colleagues from WG2 and WG3, climate scientists do have a much simpler task. The system we study is ruled by the well-known laws of physics, there is plenty of hard data and peer-reviewed studies, and the science is relatively mature.

The greenhouse effect was discovered in 1824 by Fourier, the heat trapping properties of CO2 and other gases were first measured by Tyndall in 1859, the climate sensitivity to CO2 was first computed in 1896 by Arrhenius, and by the 1950s the scientific foundations were pretty much understood.

Do the above issues suggest “politicized science,” deliberate deceptions or a tendency towards alarmism on the part of IPCC? We do not think there is any factual basis for such allegations. To the contrary, large groups of (inherently cautious) scientists attempting to reach a consensus in a societally important collaborative document is a prescription for reaching generally “conservative” conclusions. And indeed, before the recent media flash broke out, the real discussion amongst experts was about the AR4 having underestimated, not exaggerated, certain aspects of climate change.

These include such important topics as sea level rise and sea ice decline (see the sea ice and sea level chapters of the Copenhagen Diagnosis), where the data show that things are changing faster than the IPCC expected.

Shaw Kenawe said...

"Overall then, the IPCC assessment reports reflect the state of scientific knowledge very well. There have been a few isolated errors, and these have been acknowledged and corrected. What is seriously amiss is something else: the public perception of the IPCC, and of climate science in general, has been massively distorted by the recent media storm.

All of these various “gates” – Climategate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, etc., do not represent scandals of the IPCC or of climate science. Rather, they are the embarrassing battle-cries of a media scandal, in which a few journalists have misled the public with grossly overblown or entirely fabricated pseudogates, and many others have naively and willingly followed along without seeing through the scam. It is not up to us as climate scientists to clear up this mess – it is up to the media world itself to put this right again, e.g. by publishing proper analysis pieces like the one of Tim Holmes and by issuing formal corrections of their mistaken reporting. We will follow with great interest whether the media world has the professional and moral integrity to correct its own errors."

I think people should go read the links CB provided, then read the rebuttals and form their own conclusions.

(O)CT(O)PUS said...

Shaw, some quick comments about climate change (I don't want to get bogged down in this off-topic argument).

Much of scientific research is based on observation points and statistical tests for validity based on those observations. The deeper one goes into the underlying data, the deeper one gets into the difference between trend lines and statistical outliers.

Data points clustered around a trend line show strong evidence of a pattern. Validity can be easily established when data points are packed closely together. However, when data points fall outside a trend zone, these are called outliers, i.e., they don't conform to a tight clustering pattern.

One measures variability to separate random distributions (i.e. system noise) from true patterns.

In the political arena, a naysayer focuses attention on outliers to disprove the argument. Scientists and statisticians rely on mathematical validity tests to prove or disprove a hypothesis. To date, all mathematical validity tests support the climate change argument.

Many naysayers (I call them boiled frogs) debunk computer modeling, a case in point. I should point out that the Space Shuttle was designed on a supercomputer because one cannot possibility create similar stress conditions in a wind tunnel. Thus, supercomputer modeling works: End of story.

CB is acting here as a politician ... a naysayer focusing on the outliers. What CB is not: A scientist with an intellectual grasp of math and statistical methodology. What galls me about climate change arguments from non-scientists: They really know nothing but argue as if they know everything.

I'll take 3,000 world-class PhDs, the number of scientists who endorse the UN Treaty on Climate Change, over CB any day.

Arthurstone said...

The argument isn't about 'socialism' or the vastly overused terms 'liberty' and 'freedom' rather the argument is about how long Americans can remain the center of the universe and blithely continue on our wasteful and destructive path at the expense of the rest of the world.

No one is ever, ever going to persuade 'real' Americans they can't squander, pollute, ruin, befoul and destroy our planet and all it contains.

It's what the founding fathers would have wanted.

Right?

Craig Bardo said...

I have to apologize twice in one thread, this time for the "thread jacking." I looked at the cartoon above this and took off.

Octo,

What you say may have some validity in its very small band. But because it ignores the sun and get's the effect of CO2 backward, your observations might be valid about the stochastics but there's just one problem - there's no data to support it! The other issues of fraud, manipulation, lack of peer review and cover up aren't simply bad optics because they are central to the original, wholly flawed thesis.

The bad optics that aren't necessarily central to the thesis are the Himalayas, Dutch sea level, rain forrest depletion, polar bears, etc., but they are indicative of the attempt to gin up unwarranted hysteria and quick action before the hoax could be discovered.

By the way, 30,000 PhD.s have signed a declaration that the "science" behind anthropogenic climate change is flawed at best. I'll take these over your 3,000 (and shrinking).

Arthurstone said...

Actually it's 30,000 'scientists' & 9,000 Phds.

Who knows. A few may even have expertise in the field

Doubtful though.

(O)CT(O)PUS said...

CB: "The other issues of fraud, manipulation, lack of peer review and cover up aren't simply bad optics because they are central to the original, wholly flawed thesis."

If you are referring to the East Anglia cyber theft of of emails, don't go chest-thumping over this. Cyber-crime is cyber crime and unworthy of hero-worship or a dignified discussion. The cyber-theft proved nothing, and your 30,000 figure is bogus.

Furthermore, the fact that you hijacked this thread twice already, and apologized twice, suggests that your opposition to climate change is more OCD than based on fact ... a behavioral pattern I noticed since you were affiliated with Conservative Convictions (blog) almost two years ago.

I am in a real bad mood today, so don't get me started.

Craig Bardo said...
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Craig Bardo said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Arthurstone said...

Subtract biology, physics and chemistry instructors from Christian highschools and colleges. Remove employees of energy, pharma and manufacturing. Delete 'Pharmacists for Life' and then let's look at the alleged 30,000 'scientists'.

Also, as the rightwing is so fond of saying 'what's consensus to do with science' anyway?

The fact that 30,000 ' scientists' agree with GOP talking points proves only that dogma will often trump science.

What's new?

dmarks said...

Anon asked: "Several reasons? Do tell. I can't wait to hear this."

Why? It's probably off topic, anyway.

dmarks said...
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dmarks said...
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Craig Bardo said...

I'm feeling really guilty about jacking this thread, which was an error based on the cartoon.

So, I'll make this offer to Shaw, whose blog is much more heavily trafficked than my own. You can post anything you like, sans my editorial, on my blog.

(O)CT(O)PUS said...

CB, in case you are wondering where your comments went... poof! ... I deleted them. You hijacked Shaw's post three times, forced your own agenda here, and tried to turn this into your own personal soapbox.

Learn some manners before you return here.

Craig Bardo said...

Octo,

It's apparently your right to delete commentary as an administrator on this blog. You should start higher up thread though, so as not to embarrass yourself as have the "scientists" you support.

dmarks said...

Point taken, Octo. Only my on-topic comments remain on this "thread" now.

(O)CT(O)PUS said...

Dmarks, my argument is not with you. You have always been loyal to Shaw. CB, however, comes here as a belligerent, always full of himself, but only on rare occasions as a gentleman.

(And he was clearly forewarned that I was not in a good mood today. Did he read this warning? Noo!)

dmarks said...

Thanks. I didn't want to "press it" however. My two global warming comments were as off-topic as anything.

Craig Bardo said...

Shaw,

I've worn out my welcome, it seems. You're welcome anytime at my blog.