Where Are My Keys?

In this video, the role of "The Economy" will be played by the concrete buffer..

And "The Obama Administration" will be played by the construction workers.

 

Found it over at Innocent Bystanders

We need a few more leaders in the Black Community to follow the lead of Spike Lee..

Education is the key:

“Your generation, they now equate intelligence with acting White and ignorance with acting Black, and they wear it like a badge of honor. They say, ‘I’m ghetto. I’m gangster.’ What they are is ignorant.”

When will more role models speak to this with impressionable, young, black minds?  Athletes, actors, musicians, and most important-parents-need to beat this drum as loudly as possible.

What makes the Middle Class grow smaller isn't the tax rate the Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett pay, it's getting a good education at all levels-elementary through college-that better positions one for success later in life.

You don't have to graduate first in your class from a prep school or an ivy-league college.  I'm the product of the public school system, and a State college.  My daughter's kindergarten tuition for one year, is more than my tuition for college.  For four years.

The Black Community needs more guys like Cosby and Spike out there, educating young minds, reminding them to take advantage of the opportunity before them.  You get one chance to get it right while you are in school.

Kudos to Spike Lee for speaking out.  There probably isn't much that he and I would agree on politically, but we see eye-to-eye here.

"Settled Science:, right?

Were you aware of the data released this past week, showing that the planet hasn't warmed in the last 15 years?  You weren't?

How strange.  I wonder why?

The data was compiled from 30,000+ weather stations, and that there hasn't been warming since 1997.  Even more incredibly, scientists point to solar activity, and not Man, to explain the warming trend back then.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.

Yes, it's hard for me to take anything that comes from Nogales Tech U of A seriously, but it's tough to argue with the findings.

Not that the findings will change anything for the Believers of the Religion of Man-Made Global Warming.

The challenge now is for those scientists that forecasted dire circumstances if CO2 levels continued to rise.  Those predictions have not come true, yet CO2 levels continue to climb.

‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.

CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.

So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.

‘The ten-year projection remains groundbreaking science. The period for the original projection is not over yet,’ he said.

Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000 until now’.

‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.

He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the  Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.

Some point to the role water plays in the scheme of things:

She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .

Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.

The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.

‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’

Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

Because reputations (and more importantly, reseach grants, are on the line, expect the MMGW community of scientists to push back against these new findings.

I've asked the question before to my readers, What would it take for you to change your position on a certain topic?  I wonder how much impact these new findings will have on our MMGW friends.

No good deed goes unpunished..

Kid tries to pay back the good deeds of those who helped him, and gets suspended for it.

The 17-year-old leukemia survivor said he decided over the holidays to grow out his hair and donate it to Locks of Love after learning that the sister of a family friend had cancer.

In the process, officials at Madison Academy in Burton ruled Monday that Gaskins' hairstyle is violating school policy.

Despite his suspension, the teen says he isn't planning to cut his hair and hopes the board of the charter school near Flint will reconsider.

"I fought cancer my entire life. I'm going to keep fighting this," he said. "I'm not going to not give back just because my school says no."

Gaskins' mother, Christa Plante, says she supports her son's effort "100 percent."

On Monday, she launched a petition on Change.org asking the school to amend its hair policy for boys to allow them to grow it for charity donation.

Plante said her son has been assisted by charities over the years, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Now he's ready to do his part, she said.

"He's seen how it works and how it helped people, how it helped us," she said. "This is for him. He wants to do it now. This feels right."

Well done, Madison Academy.

What will Joe Pa's legacy be?

Over the span of a long career, there is bound to be evidence of both good and bad in a man's body of work.  While the guilt or innocence of Joe Paterno will be discussed for many years in the courthouse of America's drinking establishments, here's something to consider:

In 2000, Penn State freshman defensive back Adam Taliaferro had his spine crushed when tackling an Ohio State player. He lay on that September field paralyzed and panicked.

The first person he saw when he opened his eyes was Paterno, who died Sunday at 85.

"He could see I was losing it, but his eyes stayed totally calm," Taliaferro remembers. "And I remember that familiar, high-pitched voice, going, 'You're gonna get through this, Kid. You're gonna be OK.' And I just trusted him. I believed it."

Taliaferro wound up in a hospital bed in Philadelphia, everything frozen solid below the neck. Doctors said he had about a 3 percent chance of walking again. And every other week, Paterno would fly to Philly to see him.

"He'd bring our trainer and a couple of my teammates," Taliaferro says. "Nobody in the hospital knew he was there." Paterno would tell him all the dumb things his teammates and coaches had done lately. Pretty soon, Taliaferro would be laughing his IVs out.

"I can't tell you what that meant to me," says Taliaferro, now 30. "I'm stuck in that hospital, and here's Coach Paterno bringing a piece of the team to me, in the middle of the season. How many coaches would do that?"

One midnight, Taliaferro moved a toe and the first person his dad called was Paterno. His dad held the phone to Adam's ear and Paterno said, "You're gonna prove 'em all wrong, Kid!"

From then on, every visit, Paterno wanted to see Taliaferro move something new. "I got to where I wanted to be ready. A finger, a hand, whatever. I wanted to perform for Coach Paterno."

One day, five months into it, Paterno walked in and said, "What's new, Kid?" Taliaferro swung his legs over the bed, stood and extended his hand to shake.

"I'll never forget his eyes," he says. "They were already huge behind those Coke-bottle glasses, but they got even bigger." Paterno gave him a 10-second hug and then said, "Kid, ya make me proud."

Paterno went on to encourage that kid to go to law school, become a lawyer, and is now running for a spot on the Penn State Board of Trustees.  Clearly, Paterno had a significant impact on a yong man's life, and opened a world to him that he most likely would not have discovered, if not for Penn State.

Then you have the other side of the equation.  A man that stayed on too long, lost control of a very powerful force, and enabled despicable things to happen on his watch.

Will Paterno be remembered more for the long career, the wins, the men he shaped, and the lessons he taught?  Or will he be remembered as a guy who should have seen what was going on beneath his nose, and bears significant responsibility for dozens of boys losing their innocence, childhood, and their identity?

I guess time will tell.

Presented without comment..

 

Yep, I'm sure glad my tax dollars are hard at work..

How many other clowns like this are there out there, wasting taxpayer dollars?

 

Weekly IUC data..

Sorry I didn't get this up yesterday when it came out.  The numbers slipped in the wrong direction, increasing to 377,000 new claims.

The four-week average is still below 400,000, but the weekly numbers are all over the board.  Stay tuned.

Skip the drinks at Joe Rogan's house..

I've never understood why people do what they do on Fear Factor.  It's not like they are winning millions of dollars, I think the winners pick up $50,000.  This one ain't quite worth the effort in my eyes. 

Before you raise anyone's taxes..

How about getting the people that work for you to pay theirs first, mmkay?

A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama's executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven't paid any share, let alone their fair share.

...

The tax offenders include employees of the U.S. Senate who help write the laws imposed on everyone else. They owe $2.1 million. Workers in the House of Representatives owe $8.5 million, Department of Education employees owe $4.3 million and over at Homeland Security, 4,697 workers owe about $37 million. Active duty military members owe more than $100 million.

The Treasury Department, where Obama nominee Tim Geithner had to pay up $42,000 in his own back taxes before being confirmed as secretary, has 1,181 other employees with delinquent taxes totaling $9.3 million.

As usual, the Postal Service, with more than 600,000 workers, has the most offenders (25,640), who also owe the most -- almost $270 million. Veterans Affairs has 11,659 workers owing the IRS $151 million while the Energy Department that was so quick to dish out more than $500 million to the Solyndra folks has 322 employees owing $5 million.

The country's chief law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice, has 2,069 employees who are nearly $17 million behind in taxes. Like Operation Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder has apparently missed them too.

As with ordinary people, the IRS attempts to negotiate back-tax payment plans with all delinquents, whose names cannot be released. But according to current federal law, the only federal employees who can be fired for not paying taxes are IRS workers.

I'd say it's time to change that law.