waka waka waka

Iran is playing a very dangerous game at the moment, and they are raising the stakes simultaneously on several of their wagers. First, they have now announced that they are planning, despite recent conciliatory remarks, to proceed with the enrichment of nuclear fuel to near-weapons-grade levels. In this they are gambling that China and Russia will provide a sufficient counterpoise to thwart any Western pressure for international sanctions (it was Russia, after all, who provided the fuel rods, for the Bushehr reactor, that make this enrichment program possible, and relations between China and the US have been disintegrating rapidly in recent weeks). The US has been tight-lipped about this latest act of brinkmanship, but meanwhile the Fifth Fleet and the Israeli Navy are said to be preparing various options in the Gulf.

Second, Iran has been airlifting medium-range surface-to-surface missiles into Syria, presumably under the terms of a new agreement signed by the Iranian and Syrian defense ministers Gen. Ahmad Vahidi and Gen. Ali Habib. The purpose of this latest pact between Syria and Iran is, as always, to strengthen the encirclement of Israel by their proxies Hizballah and Hamas. To this end Syria lately delivered to Hizballah a shipment of mobile-launched, highly lethal Fateh-110 missiles, which can carry a half-ton warhead 150 miles, putting all of Israel’s principal cities within range from Lebanon.

These developments are, of course, worrisome in terms of the general stability of the region, but to Israel they present an immediate, and extremely acute, existential threat. It is hard for me to believe that they will not act, and soon. What this will mean in terms of US involvement is far from clear, but at the very least I should expect that the Navy will not stand idly by.

I think there are probably a lot of people in Washington and Jerusalem who aren’t getting much sleep right now.

Last week NASA announced that the decade just ended was the warmest on record. I was a little surprised by that, because everything I’d been reading — including the Climategate material — seemed to indicate otherwise; indeed the inconvenient lack of warming this decade was starting to turn into a real marketing headache for the burgeoning global-warming industry, and its affiliated political movement — both of which must of course keep up appearances if the gravy-train is to stay on the rails.

Of course, as we have already understood, warming by itself is not enough: the Earth has warmed and cooled throughout its long history, and was doing so, of course, long before we showed up. In order to get the big payoff, not only does one have to demonstrate warming, one also has to demonstrate that it’s all our fault (and furthermore, that we ought to care). But one thing’s for sure: without some juicy, incriminating pictures up front, the whole racket goes bust.

But there it was: a new report from NASA, saying in no uncertain terms that they had the goods.

Well, of course they might be right: for all I know, maybe the Earth has been getting warmer in the past decade. But given how profitable the operation is, and what scurrilous machinations have already been exposed, I had a sneaking feeling that there might be more to the story.

Lo and behold! Astonishingly, it appears that there is. Have a look here.

Update: with a hat-tip to our friend Mike Zaharee, here’s more.

In a lip-smackingly delicious reversal for the Democrats’ rampaging statist juggernaut, conservative upstart Scott Brown has prevailed in Massachusetts, snatching away a glittering prize: a Senate seat that had been a liberal fiefdom for 46 years.

Columnist Michael Graham, writing in the Boston Herald, said that the disastrously incompetent campaign run by heir apparent Martha Coakley was like “the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.”

It should be interesting to see what happens next.

The catastrophe in Haiti has evoked an enormous worldwide response. The biggest role so far has been played by the United States Navy, which was quick to dispatch various important resources. For the past few days a Navy “resource” of my own has been sending me informative emails and links describing and analyzing this mission.

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Readers may recall a recent event that has come to be known as the Norway Spiral Anomaly. The cause, briefly mysterious, was soon revealed to have been a malfunctioning Russian missile that, as it tumbled through the sky, ejected exhaust in a helical pattern that was backlit by the sun. It was an impressive display.

Readers anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere will also have noticed that, despite various proclamations lately emanating from Copenhagen, East Anglia, and the hard-working pie-hole of one Albert A. Gore, roughly half the globe is now blanketed in snow and ice. Britain, northern Europe, and much of China have been paralyzed by sequential blizzards, and frozen iguanas are falling from the trees in the Sunshine State.

Well, according to the Pakistan Daily — a reliable source if ever there was one — these two stories are one. A headline in that paper’s January 8th edition informs us of the following:

Norway Time Hole “Leak” Plunges Northern Hemisphere Into Chaos

Russian scientists are reporting to Prime Minister Putin today that the high-energy beam fired into the upper heavens from the United States High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) radar facility in Ramfjordmoen, Norway this past month has resulted in a “catastrophic puncturing” of our Plant’s thermosphere thus allowing into the troposphere an “unimpeded thermal inversion” of the exosphere, which is the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere.
To the West’s firing of this ‘quantum’ high-energy beam we had previously reported on in our December 10, 2009 report titled “Attack On Gods ‘Heaven’ Lights Up Norwegian Sky”.

To how catastrophic for our Planet this massive thermal inversion has been Anthony Nunan, an assistant general manager for risk management at Mitsubishi Corporation in Tokyo, is reporting today that the entire Northern Hemisphere is in winter chaos, with the greatest danger from this unprecedented Global event being the destruction of billions of dollars worth of crops in a World already nearing the end of its ability to feed its self.

And if this weren’t bad enough — a puncturing of our Plant’s thermosphere leading to a thermal inversion of the exosphere, in a World already nearing the end of its ability to feed its self — the news gets even worse:

To the long-term consequences of this thermal inversion caused by the West, these reports further warn that by the puncturing of our atmosphere by the HHARP radars our Planet has, also, been “needlessly exposed” to the growing threat posed to us by the giant mysterious object currently approaching us (named by NASA as G1.9) which we had previously reported on in our January 3rd report titled “Russia Prepares For Asteroid Strike As New Comet Nears Sun”, and which has been blamed for the rapid shifting of our Earth’s North Pole that was first documented in 2005.

Well, this could be it, folks. I thought that Pole was looking a little out of whack. And all our fault, too, of course. No wonder they don’t like us over there.

In a post today at his website, Lawrence Auster brings to our attention a formidably gifted and hitherto-undiscovered satiric talent, a modern day Laszlo Toth: one Doug Van Gorder, from Quincy, Mass.

At least, we think he’s a satiric talent.

Anyway, he’s got people talking. Here.

One of our stronger cognitive intuitions is to assume, in the presence of organized systems, that there is some central, organizing agency at work. In recent decades, however, it has become apparent that extraordinarily sophisticated group-level behavior can arise as a result of distributed local decision-making, using very simple rules.

Among the best examples of this is the behavior of swarms. Nobody’s in charge — each bird or fish or insect operates entirely autonomously, according to its local copy of the instructions — but the swarm acts very much as if its behavior is co-ordinated at the level of the swarm itself. Indeed, it can seem that the group taken as a whole exhibits a kind of emergent intelligence that is present in none of its mindless constituents.

For a truly impressive example, have a look here.

A very happy New Year to you all! Thank you as always for dropping by to read and comment.

Every year about this time I look back at the thousands and thousands of keyphrases that have brought visitors here from Google and other search engines. There are usually quite a few spectacular oddities (though for some reason the past year didn’t produce nearly the bumper crop I’ve become accustomed to). Here are some selections from 2009:

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To you all.