A few days ago, writing with regard to the media’s decision to ignore the standing ovations Newt received during the last South Carolina debate, I asked “If the Press Ignores an Event, Does It Exist?“  The press, it turns out, wants to take that experiment in ignoring facts as far as it can go.

Today, I present you with an even more egregious example, one that sees that media ignore several hundred thousand people walking down the streets of Washington, D.C.  The event, of course, was the March For Life, something the media would prefer not to acknowledge.  As the Anchoress says:

You want the truth? You think you deserve it? The press can’t handle the truth; they can’t bring it to you.

That’s why 250 people camping out in a park gets thousands of stories, while half-a-million marching on Washington does not get reported at all, or if it does, the pictures are cropped; the attendees are caricatured, mis-named and under-represented while their opponents are over-represented.

You should, of course, read her entire post.

As I often say, I’m not yet fully recovered from my years in the Pro-Choice camp, so I won’t be marching any time soon with the Pro-Life people, even though I admire them more than my former fellow travelers.  I am, though, very much pro-truth.  And as I lawyer, I can tell you that, as a matter of law, selective omission is just as much a fraud is deliberately deceptive affirmative statements.

Market Street is San Francisco’s main drag.  There are other major streets in the City, but Market Street the one that starts just below Twin Peaks and travels diagonally northeast all the way to the Ferry Building.  It traverses the Castro District, the outer fringes of the Mission District, the Civic Center area and the financial district.  It is a street with stature.

Under the Municipal Code, the City will hang banners on major thoroughfares, including Market Street, if the banners promote an “event or series of events of interest to a significant portion of the residents of San Francisco.”  The event promoters must therefore make a credible showing that they “reasonably expect an in-person attendance of 500 or more people for a single event or 1,000 or more people for a series of events.”  Parades, concerts, etc., have all been bannerized at one time or another.

Most recently, a new series of banners went up on Market Street, paid for by a group called “OurSilverRibbon.org.”  The banners have an unabashedly pro-abortion messages:

U.S. Out Of My Uterus

Her Decision, Her Choice

San Francisco is Pro-Choice

Interestingly, none of these pro-abortion banners, all of which appear on City property, happen to mention an actual event.  Or maybe not so interestingly.  As the Life Legal Defense Foundation discovered when it investigated the banners, the City’s Department of Public Works issued the banners in conjunction with a promised “Walk for Trust Women/Silver Ribbon Campaign” event that was supposed to take the form of a parade on Market Street this coming Friday.  At the same time the group applied for a parade permit for this coming Saturday morning.

Except that, as the SF Chronicle itself acknowledges, it “[T]urns out, none of that’s quite right“:

The Silver Ribbon Campaign to Trust Women’s website has long said to come back for more information about an upcoming event. Today, it released the specifics: Its Walk for Choice SF – billed as “an event to commemorate and admire the pro-choice banners on Market Street” will be held Sunday at 1 p.m. in Justin Herman Plaza. So the banners are promoting an event to admire the banners. And they’re not for the day or time listed on the event permits. Oh, and the campaign is expecting “a couple hundred people,” at the event, according to Ellen Shaffer, co-founder of the campaign.

In other words, rather than spending money to buy commercial billboard space, a pro-abortion organization lied in order to have the City of San Francisco fund its pro-abortion advertising.  Regardless of how one feels about the abortion issue, this is sleazy, fraudulent behavior.

Some city residents are apparently less than thrilled with this little game:  “[O]f the original 72 banners, just 45 remain flying. Apparently vandals have ripped down the rest.”

One of the many blessings of our American military is that it’s a Constitutional military that has as its Commander in Chief a civilian elected by the American public.  (Although history has shown, fairly recently in fact, that the American public sometimes elects bad CinCs.)  Because the elected CinC is frequently someone without military experience, a theoretically non-partisan command hierarchy exists to advise him.

For the most part, our military does a decent job of avoiding politics.  I’m not always sure how it manages this.  For example, the current CinC just announced cuts that will reduce our military to 1930s status — and we know how well that went back then.  He did so despite the fact that world events put the lie to his happy peppy statement that the world is entering a time of peace.  Our poor military.  It gets an order from its CinC — “You must shrink” — and then has to figure out how to do that without destroying itself.

So, how does a Constitutional military handle a command from on high that is stupid, unrealistic and dangerous?  I guess it does what our military did:  It follows orders, announcing a plan to shrink, one that serious military analysts find very worrisome.  Even smart militaries have to do stupid because the rules of them game require them to do so.

Sometimes, though, the military manages to engage in unforced errors that are clearly the result of politicization.  This is not party politics, it’s just Beltway, Foggy Bottom stupidity.  After all, if you’re going to hang around the Pentagon for a while, you’re going to be infected by the political pandering that makes Washington what it is — a place and entity that nobody likes or respects.  In this case, the United States Army could not resist affirmative action’s siren song.

You probably recall reading back in September 2009 that the Army (which was now reporting to the Obama White House) appointed the first woman ever as Command Sergeant Major of the U.S. Army’s Drill Sergeant School (DSS).  What made this appointment even more exciting for those in the affirmative action business was the fact that Teresa King wasn’t just female, she was black.  It was a two-fer for political correctness.

If Sergeant Major King had been female, black, battle hardened, and brilliant, everything would have been fine and dandy.  Unfortunately, King seems to have been more decorative than functional as a Sergeant Major:

Reports from MCC’s on the ground correspondents say King’s suspension from duty was prompted by her heavy drinking, sexual relationship with a lower ranking enlisted soldier, and the fact that at least one of the college degree she listed on her resume is from a schools deemed to be diploma mill.

Almeda College where King lists as the school from which she was granted a Master’s degree in business management, has been closed by legal action in both Florida and Idaho because it was declared a fake institution.

Another embarrassing element of King’s persona – which she has built around a “sergeant no slack” façade — is the fact that in spite of her tough talk, she has never been in a combat zone, which makes gaining the respect of her battle-hardened veteran students difficult at best.

Whoops!  One wonders if King willingly went along with the charade that she was competent, or if the heavy drinking is a sign that she was an affirmative action sacrificial lamb who knew she was in over her head.

The problem, of course, is that the decorative Sergeant Major King did not hold a merely decorative position.  Unlike today’s European royals, who are meaningless figureheads, King was appointed to an extremely important institution, ones that trains the Army’s backbone:  the sergeants.  Heck, I’ve watched enough Hollywood movies to know that, without the sergeant drilling, haranguing, fathering (and mothering) the troops, there is no Army (or Marine Corp, or anything else).  For the powers that be at the Pentagon to play silly little political games to curry favor with the Obama administration, with the U.S. Military paying the price, is a shocking example of politics.  Not partisan politics, just stupid politics.

Sergeant Major King has currently been suspended from duty and the Army is doing its best to keep this story off the front page.  Funnily enough, King’s lack of qualifications should help.  If King was actually as good as she should have been, the MSM would have been all over a story “proving” that the Army is a racist, sexist organization that never gave the first black, female Command Sergeant Major a chance.  However, if the charges against King are true — that she was a shabby paper tiger who never should have gotten the job — the MSM will work tightly with the Army to keep this story out of the public eye.  For the Army, the appointment is an embarrassing example of stupid; for the media, it’s a glaring failure in their affirmative action world view.

By now, all people, young and old, know better than to give their credit card information out over the phone.  The thieves, knowing that this well has gone dry, have a new approach, which has them conning you into giving out the card security number.  Although this approach has been around for at least seven years now, it’s new to me, so I’m passing it on to you.  Check it out and be aware.

Some things go out with a whimper.  Global warming may well be going out with a bang.  The latest news from Russia is the claim that the global warming scientists didn’t just have faulty code and highly massaged numbers.  It turns out that they also messed with the underlying data, falsifying it or ignoring data that didn’t match their political goals:

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)

A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.

The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.

Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.

Whoops! Can we now return to our normal lives and stop the hysteria?

Normal lives should include trying to generate as little pollution as possible, treasuring the earth’s resources, and generally being good stewards. Normal lives should not include the breakdown of the American economy nor should it continue to render America incapable of relying on its own energy resources to serve its own energy needs. It is insane that we’re funding oil drilling in Brazil, buying oil from Saudi Arabia, and letting Iran continue to get rich, all the while sitting on our own massive reserves. We should be drilling, although we should do so with discipline and a focus on the cleanest, least environmentally harmful methods possible.

My post title is a bit of an exaggeration.  It’s not clear that the science is fraudulent.  It’s just clear that the scientist is fraudulent:

A sweeping California regulation aimed at cutting hazardous pollution from diesel engine exhaust could be derailed after a key state researcher on the project was caught in a lie about his academic credentials.

The California Air Resources Board is scheduled to meet today to discuss whether to delay the implementation of the regulation because of the weak economy, which some experts claim has led to a drop in diesel emissions. But that discussion has been overshadowed by revelations about the researcher’s trumped-up resume.

Two of the 11 air board members have asked that the anti-pollution rules be suspended because they were partially based on a report by Hien Tran that found particulates in diesel emissions account for 3,500 premature deaths a year in California. Tran falsely claimed he had a doctorate in statistics from UC Davis.

“I’ve been on the air board 14 years and I’ve never seen anything approaching this,” said Ron Roberts, who also is a San Diego County supervisor. He added that the air board should do everything it can to assure the public “the science is proper to arrive at legitimate decisions.”

[snip]

Tran, whose estimate of 3,500 deaths was higher than previous estimates, does have a doctorate in statistics, but he obtained it from Thornhill University, a distance learning school. He has a master’s degree in the subject from UC Davis.

Tran, who has worked at the air board for 11 years, was demoted and his salary was cut by $1,066 per month to $7,899 per month. He was not fired.

Read the rest here.

The regulation at issue is no small thing, since it is estimated that it will cost the trucking industry $5.5 billion dollars.  That’s a big chunk of money, all of which you know will show up as significantly higher prices in stores.  That’s always painful, but especially so during rescessions.

In the wake of the emails that an anonymous whistleblower published, those of us who aren’t scientists have been able to figure out that something is very, very wrong with the AGW data.  Still, all the science stuff is confusing, especially the bit about “hide the decline.”  Thankfully, at American Thinker, Marc Sheppard takes the time, and uses words of one scientific syllable, to explain what “hide the decline” really means, and why it was such a terrible fraud.

UPDATE:  Charlie Martin also has a great short form sheet, explaining, clearly and briefly, why the emails matter.

From The Weekly Standard:

With the release of hundreds of emails by scientists advocates of global warming showing obvious and entirely inappropriate collusion by the authors — including attempts to suppress dissent, to punish journals that publish peer-reviewed studies casting doubt on global warming, and to manipulate data to bolster their own arguments — even the New York Times is forced to concede that “the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.” But apparently the paper’s environmental blog, Dot Earth, is taking a pass on publishing any of the documents and emails that are now circulating. Andrew Revkin, the author of that blog, writes,

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

This is the position of the New York Times when given the chance to publish sensitive information that might hinder the liberal agenda. Of course, when the choice is between publishing classified information that might endanger the lives of U.S. troops in the field or intelligence programs vital to national security, that information is published without hesitation by the nation’s paper of record. But in this case — the documents were “never intended for the public eye,” so the New York Times will take a pass. I guess that policy wasn’t in place when Neil Sheehan was working at the paper.

(Read the rest here.)

My thoughts exactly.

I just had to laugh.  The New York Times report on the hacked climate change documents starts off pretty honestly:

Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

So, if I’m an intelligent reader, I’m thinking, “Scientists are using tricks to fudge data?!  That must mean the actual data supporting the theory is absent or unreliable.”

“No, no,” the Times hastens to assure me:

The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.

“But wait,” says the intelligent reader (assuming the Times has any), “didn’t you just tell me that massive numbers of documents have been produced showing that the data is flawed?”

So, we’re left with an article that admits that hundreds of email show fraud, but we’re not to worry, because the materially they’re trying to prove fraudulently is actually true.

If you’re thinking you’ve heard this before, you have.  It happened with Rathergate, when Democratic operatives produced documents showing, for the first and only time, that George Bush shirked his duties in the National Guard.  In an exceptionally good bit of investigative journalism, Charles Johnson showed that those documents were a complete fraud.  Bye-bye any evidence of George Bush avoiding his National Guard duties.

Did the absence of evidence, coupled with the fact that someone had to stoop to create false evidence, stop the Left?  Nooo.  Instead, we were told that the documents were “fake, but accurate.”  That’s how it works on the Left.  If you have a theory, you stick to it, regardless of the absence of evidence.  Evidence is icing, but you always have your theoretical cake.

On the Right, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  On the Left, you’re always right, regardless of what comes along.  By the way, in psychiatric circles, I believe they call that delusional thinking.  In political and media circles, they call it the sweet smell of success.

I should add here, that the New York Times article goes on to argue, in every way possible, that the emails showing a fraud were misinterpreted.  The word “trick” for example, even though coupled with references to jiggering data, simply means “cleverness” not hoax.  And, again, we’re assured that, even though these climate change guys were paranoid, vindictive, secretive, and periodically dishonest, we should definitely trust them.  I prefer this theory, instead, but freely admit that I operate on the principle that, whatever Al Gore is for, I’m against it.

It’s a story that broke first in Europe, but is making its way here.  (I heard about it on NewsFifty, which is constantly adding links.)  Here’s the story, briefly:  Hadley GRU is one of the major climate change advocacy organizations.  Hackers broke into its database and discovered more than a thousand emails and documents indicating that scientists were colluding with the organization to push the “man made global warming” mantra — irrespective of the actual data.  Indeed, in many cases, it appears that the organization, sometimes working with the scientists, was falsifying the data to push the agenda.  This stuff pre-dates Al Gore’s “frog in the blender” (or do I mean “frog in the boiling water”?) campaign, but it surely informs the campaign, which started shortly after and continued during this information creation period.

Here, for your shock and enjoyment, are some samples of those emails.  By the way, I’ve kept the bolding that Andrew Bolt, at the Herald Sun, did when he printed up these emails.

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich

Well, as the Church Lady would say, “isn’t that special?”  Or how about this one, written almost exactly a decade later:

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
***

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

Horrifyingly,these confessions of the evidence of absence and the absence of honest evidence go on and on and on.

This is a huge story, and you would be doing yourself and world a big favor if you would make sure to broadcast it.  It’s only if we keep the pressure on that the MSM will ever so reluctantly acknowledge the existence of this data.