Sunday, January 3, 2010

Burt Rutan on AGW...

If you're interested in aviation or space flight at all, you almost certainly know of Burt Rutan – widely considered the most innovative aviation engineer ever.  He's famous for so many things it's hard to keep track of them all, but they include: gyroplanes, several of the private spacecraft (including Virgin's), the first aircraft to fly around the world, the Veri-Eze homebuilt experimental airplane (and it's relatives), and much, much more.  He's one of the world's foremost experts on composite materials.

He's not a climatolagist.  But he's one very smart guy with a world-class BS detector.

Burt Rutan thinks the AGW hypothesis is a complete fraud, and he thought so long before ClimateGate.  I just found out about Rutan's views myself.  His credibility is very high with me; I reacted to his thoughts here much as I did when I discovered that Freeman Dyson was an AGW skeptic.

Check out Rutan's presentation on the subject (including videos) at Watts Up With That.  Excellent stuff.

What's It Mean to be at War? Obama Has No Idea...

Mark Steyn takes Obama and his administration to task for their responses to the Knickerbomber:
"suspect..." "charged..." The president can't tell an allegedly alleged suspect (which is what he is in Obama fantasy land) from an enemy combatant (which is what he is in cold, hard reality). But worse than the complacent cop-show jargonizing was a phrase it's hard to read as anything other than a deliberate attempt to mislead the public: the president referred to the Knickerbomber as an "isolated extremist." By this time, it was already clear that young Umar had been radicalized by jihadist networks in London and fast-tracked to training in Yemen by terror operatives who understood the potentially high value of a westernized Muslim with excellent English from a respectable family. Yet President Obama tried to pass him off as some sort of lone misfit who wakes up one morning and goes bananas. Could happen to anyone.
Read the whole thing here.

2010 – the Year of the Chickens...

The chickens coming home to roost, that is.  Victor Davis Hansen has an interesting piece on how some of the lamer moves on the part of the Obama administration are likely to create some unhappy consequences sometime this year...

The Gathering Storm...

Scary graphic, but the message is dead serious.  At every turn, our liberal congress-critters are doing their best to limit one of American's most fundamental rights: the right to bear arms.

I just hope we have enough concerned citizens to beat back these efforts...