12 Terrorists Killed - Updated

(Nouakchott, Mauritania) Another source confirms that 12 al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) terrorists were killed last weekend in fighting that took place in the Timbuktu region of Mali.



West Saharan Africa
The Mauritanian operations were approved by the government of Mali since AQIM dominates in the northern part of the country.

For the first time in years, the Mauritanian Air Force, consisting of several U.S.-origin Basler BT-67 and Cessna-337 transports, conducted air strikes against armored vehicles, killing 12 terrorists and really pissing AQIM off.

“Our Muslim brothers in the North of Mali were the object of a cowardly aggression, which killed two women, Najiya et Salka, and wounded one man,” the statement said.

"The Mauritanian army, acting in the pay of miscreants who kill innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq, is lying when it says that the woman who was killed was the wife of a mujahidin.”

They called Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz the agent of France and said that the blood of the two women who were killed would not go unavenged.

Meanwhile, AQIM is believed to be responsible for kidnapping seven people in northern Niger, including five French nationals. In response, France has dispatched a company of 80 troops to recover the hostages.

* * * * *
12 Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb Killed
[Previous 9/20/10 post]
(Mauritania-Mali Border) Here's an intriguing report.

Mauritanian soldiers killed at least 12 al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb terrorists during a 2-day skirmish that ended Saturday (September 18th) in Mali.

As part of the Sahel-Saharan security co-operation initiative, Mali warned Mauritania on Friday that a column of AQIM armoured vehicles was observed heading to the shared border to attack a Mauritanian military post, the Mauritanian Defence Minister said Saturday. [my bold]

Six Mauritanian troops died in the offensive.

Although counterterrorism experts may know otherwise, this is the first occasion I'm aware of where al-Qaeda terrorists are reported to use armored vehicles. Typically, terrorists are not viewed as having their own motor pools of military vehicles.

Obama Goes to Church

Recently, there has been a lot of controversy regarding President Obama's religious belief system which stemmed from a poll that found an inordinate number of Americans think he is a Muslim.

Given that he had only attended church twice in the previous year, the polling numbers are credited for Obama attending a Christian church last Sunday with his family.

Ironically, after traipsing across Lafayette Park to St. John's Episcopal Church, Obama was greeted by Dr. Ziad Asali, a prominent pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Muslim activist, the guest speaker.

The elite media failed to report on the irony. Heh.

Cessna Announces 700 Workers Cut

(Wichita, Kansas) Aircraft manufacturer Cessna has announced that it is cutting 700 hourly and salaried jobs out of a workforce of 6,000. All the layoffs will occur in Wichita.

According to CEO Scott Donnelly, "While we are seeing solid performance in most of our other businesses, we have not yet seen a discernable improvement in business-jet order activity,” Donnelly said in the statement.

Business jet orders are likely suffering because the fat cat high income earners are expecting a huge Obama tax increase in January, unlike the middle class who will continue to enjoy the Bush tax cuts.

However, Obama's plan backfires with respect to some middle income earners. Sure, they'll enjoy continuation of the Bush tax cuts but a lot of good that will do when they lose their jobs ... 700 in Wichita. Tax cuts and tax increases are largely inconsequential to people with no income.

Leftists mixing science with religion

Evangelical Christians have a religious obligation to oppose carbon-based fuels and to support greenhouse gas reductions, if you believe the lame stream media. In delivering such a message, the media has publicized the efforts of a very few self-professed evangelicals whose views on the topic run counter to most evangelicals.

Bryan Fischer, host of the daily 'Focal Point' radio talk program of the American Family Association, this morning has published an excellent article on the topic. Fischer questions the motives of self-professed religious leaders who attempt to weigh in on such a secular issue as global warming science. The end result, he observes, is to diminish the credibility of the church.

According to Fischer, “This, by the way, ought to be a lesson to the church. Some leaders in the church, in their ongoing and misguided efforts to be cool, hip, and admired by the world, are always chasing after the latest public policy fad, and just about the time they catch up, the world moves on, leaving them looking silly and foolish. It's happened again.”

The Sierra Club, not known for outspoken support of evangelical Christian causes, has for the past several years been spearheading the effort to mislead evangelical Christians into believing they have a religious obligation to support greenhouse gas restrictions. You can read my thoughts on such tactics here.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Nebraska to Big Ten Conference

(Lincoln, Nebraska) On July 1, 2011, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will become an official member of the Big Ten Conference. Terms of the negotiated settlement with the Big 12 Conference have been finalized.

Reactions from fans are mixed. Some dread anticipated price increases for game tickets while bemoaning the dissection of traditional rivalries. Others are eager to see the Cornhuskers challenged in an arguably tougher conference.

Obama Criticized During Townhall Meeting

(Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania) A questioner rocks President Obama momentarily during a townhall meeting. I suggest that Obama's advance team didn't vet the audience adequately.




It's easy to understand the frustration of Obama's supporters. They were promised milk and honey and sea level changes. Instead, they've seen unemployment, foreclosures and promises of tax increases.

Tip: Todd C.

Ohio Mom Indicted for Pot-Smoking Toddler

(Cincinnati, Ohio) A 21-year-old mother, Jessica Gamble, has been indicted on a charge of corruption with drugs stemming from an incident where she allowed her two-year-old daughter to smoke marijuana.

Gamble is accused of providing marijuana to her daughter in June, videotaping the episode and posting the video on YouTube.

Curiously, the child is seen in the video displaying a modicum of familiarity with smoking a marijuana cigarette, indicating that the toddler has likely done it before.

The authorities were alerted when the video hit the Internet. Here's the video.




The child was removed from Gamble's care by the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services. Gamble was booked into custody with bond set at $10,000.

Virginia Teacher Busted for Drugs

(Virginia Beach, Virginia) A 59-year-old science teacher at Kellam High School, Darcy M. Mahler, was arrested last Friday after Special Investigations detectives intercepted a package of marijuana addressed to her.

Subsequently, a search of Mahler's home found several more pounds of marijuana. She has been charged with sale and distribution of marijuana, transporting controlled substances and conspiracy to violate the Drug Control Act.

Mahler was booked in to custody at the Virginia Beach Correctional Center. No report on a bond amount. Also, two other people were arrested in the case. Devin King, 24, and Britney Ballard, 22, face the same charges as Mahler.

Witchcraft in the White House

The story is that Barack Obama's mother-in-law has been accused of practicing "witchcraft mumbo-jumbo" in the White House and Michelle has threatened to send her back to Chicago.

Heh.

Hezbollah Tests Missile in Iran

(Tehran, Iran) According to the ABNA news agency, special units of Hezbollah have successfully launched and tested a new Iranian missile "Farah 110."






Fatah 110 Missile
The missile is reported to be nine meters long, weighs 3,500 kilograms and is solid fuel propelled.

According to the report, the Iranian missile, which was displayed with great pride in Tehran less than a month ago, has a maximum range of 200 kilometers. This means it is capable of reaching occupied Jerusalem and Ashdod if it was to be launched from the Occupied Palestine-Lebanon border.

The Kuwait newspaper said the test launches took place in Iran since such an event could not take place in Lebanon.

"The test was successful and part of the units which participated returned to their bases in Lebanon," unidentified officials told Al-Rai.

Hezbollah has formulated a "bank of targets" in Israel such as "power stations and sensitive institutions" across the country, the sources added.

So, the terrorists already know where they are going to aim the missiles. That news doesn't give me a sense of the warm and cozies.

The original moonbat admits he was wrong -- grudgingly

He once claimed that Veganism was the only ethical behaviour -- but is now promoting meat! Do I hear the rustle of currency somewhere in the background?

George Monbiot, the original Moonbat Liberal, confessed in a column in the Guardian that going vegan will not save the planet from global cooling, global warming or whatever they are calling it today.

From George Monbiot: “In the Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the world’s livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism ‘is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice issue.’

I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book I’m about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.”

Then he went on to plug a book about meat.

There is another religion that recently reversed itself on meat. The Catholic church in the 1960s decided eating meat on non-Lenten Fridays was OK.

Then there is this bit from George Monbiot: “Feeding meat and bone meal to cows was insane. Feeding it to pigs, whose natural diet incorporates a fair bit of meat, makes sense, as long as it is rendered properly. The same goes for swill. Giving sterilized scraps to pigs solves two problems at once: waste disposal and the diversion of grain.

Instead we now dump or incinerate millions of tonnes of possible pig food and replace it with soya whose production trashes the Amazon. Waste food in the UK, Fairlie calculates, could make 800,000 tonnes of pork, or one sixth of our total meat consumption.”

You control what people eat, you control people. This has been done with every religion. Monbiot’s pagan Gaia religion is only the latest.

Apparently going Vegan was a deal breaker for many and so like Saint Paul kicking circumcision to the curb goes Monbiot’s vegetarianism.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Iranian Sex Traffickers in Britain

From a Daily Mail report last week:

A sex trafficking gang offered to sell the virginity of underage girls to wealthy businessmen for up to £150,000 each.

The three women and a man were offering girls as young as 13 but were arrested in an undercover Scotland Yard operation after staff at a luxury hotel tipped off police.

One of the women had arrived at the Jumeirah Carlton Hotel in Knightsbridge, central London, in a silver BMW to offer the gang's services in a handwritten letter to the owner in August last year.

It read: 'I have 12 girls ready from the age 14-20 years, who are living all over the UK, I have spent money on the preparation of this event such as a rented house for the girls and also all expenses needed.'

Gang members arrested, mostly Iranian and unemployed, include Fatima Hagnegat, 24, and her husband, Rassoul Gholampour, 30, and her aunt, Marohkh Jamali, 41, and Sara Bordbar. All admitted to sex trafficking and prostitution offenses in Harrow Crown Court.

All were sentenced to jail terms of two years and three months to two years and nine months.

The court heard that Iranians Jamali and Hagnegat were seeking asylum in Britain. Gholampour remained in Britain illegally as he has no right to remain. Bordbar is British.

In my opinion, two years and change for sex traffickers could hardly be called harsh punishment. In a tangentially-related note, I wonder if anyone else is as surprised as I am about the going rate for virgin girls.

Coach Fired for Composing Obama Song

(Franklin, Tennessee) Last month, a 26-year-old football coach at Grassland Middle School, Bryan Glover, was fired from his position for composing a song critical of President Obama and sending it to his acquaintances on the Internet. Here's the song.



Within hours, students' parents reportedly called the school and complained.

Glover said the principal at Grassland Middle School told the head football coach to release Glover from his position with the team.

"He just said parents were complaining, maybe there was a comment of racial overtones," Glover said,

"I found it amusing," said parent Michael Kasaitis about Glover's country song.

He said no matter the opinion on his music, the link was sent from his personal email account and it is free speech.

"I was totally upset. He has every right to write a song, write a book or to make his opinion known," said Kasaitis.

The Superintendent of Williamson County Schools refused to say why Glover was fired, but he did speculate it could be an issue of how he obtained the parents email addresses.

"If someone is sending an email to parents using our system or knowledge you obtained through our system, you are limited in what kind of message you can send to parents, " said Dr. Mike Looney.

Okay … but I'm not really sure what it means to be "limited in what kind of message you can send to parents."

In the final analysis, I suggest Glover was fired because his song offended the political sensitivities of school administrators and not because he possessed email addresses.

Tip: Rita and Eugene

Companion posts: TJR, AWH and Diggers Realm.

Sexism in Russia

(Moscow, Russia) The issue of women's rights seems to have failed to achieve a position of prominence in Russia, twenty years after the official fall of communism. In fact, overt Russian sexism solidly endures.

According to gender studies scholar Elena Zdravomyslova, the capitalist boom has enabled some women to progress but Russian sexist attitudes are deep-rooted.

A recent television commercial (NSFW Video) for lingerie shows long-legged women dressed only in stiletto heels and underwear, one of hundreds of such images bombarding Russians every day.

Zdravomyslova says advertisements, television programs, and glossy magazines are "aggressively sexualizing" the common idea of women's roles in society, and reinforcing traditional attitudes.

It’s those entrenched attitudes that are helping perpetuate one of Russia’s darkest secrets: domestic violence that's so pervasive many see it as a normal part of everyday life, in a country where an old saying advises, "If he beats you, he loves you."

The government's own figures estimate 14,000 women die each year from domestic violence. That's the death of one woman at the hands of her husband or partner every hour. It's more than 10 times the number of deaths in the United States, which has twice Russia's population.

Larisa Ponarina of the Anna Center for Domestic Violence says it’s impossible to tell exactly how many victims of domestic violence there are because the authorities aren't interested in the issue. She says no accurate statistics are kept, in a country whose legal system doesn’t even provide restraining orders for victims of abuse.

"It's still a man's world,” she says. “There's no conviction at the top of society that women should be advanced, and of course that influences society as a whole."

I suggest it takes generations to change traditional culture.

Swedes Elect Right Wing Government

(Stockholm, Sweden) Big news in Scandinavia! The Swedish electorate has booted the leftists from power and elected right-wingers.

With the far-right Sweden Democrats headed to the Riksdag for the first time and the traditional dominance of the Social Democrats apparently broken for good, the Swedish press on Monday reflected on the consequences of a new political era. […]

Swedish media seemed just as concerned with the complicated parliament ahead as with the historical defeat of the Social Democrats, which have dominated politics here for most of the century.

Recalling that the Social Democrats had been in power "for 83 percent of the time since 1932", [leading daily Dagens Nyheter] DN said "the time when one party was subscribed to power and could decide of everything is gladly over".

With Mona Sahlin as their leader, this election marked the Social Democrats' worse score since 1914 and "the party will never again feel like it owns Sweden", Göterborgs-Posten (GP) said.

"In other countries, it’s obviously not strange for a centre-right government to be re-elected, but this is Sweden, it's a never before seen phenomenon," said SvD.

Therefore, after the better part of a century, the Swedes have finally become disenchanted with governance by leftists.

Pick your proxy

What do we conclude when temperature proxies contradict both one another and real-world data?

We see here that a new proxy temperature measurement from South America shows the Medieval warm period and little ice age that Warmists like Michael Mann tried to "iron out" of their "hockey stick" graphs.

It also however shows a temperature upturn in the 20th century that exceeds the temperature observed in their proxy data for the Medieval warm period -- which contradicts what we certainly know about the Medieval warm period -- when the historical data that we have (Vikings farming in Greenland etc.) shows that period to be warmer than the present.

Additionally, we know that Briffa's Russian pine tree proxies showed a now famous DECLINE in 20th century temperatures -- a decline that Phil Jones & Co. famously used a "trick" to "hide". There is certainly no grounds from the thermometer readings to conclude that temperatures declined overall in the 20th century, though an argument could be made that there was no significant increase.

So where do we go from there? One could quite reasonably conclude that all temperatures are local and that we should not generalize from one place to another -- and that is a highly satisfactory conclusion for skeptics and a nasty one for the Greenies.

But my conclusion is even harsher than that. I don't see how we can trust ANY proxy unless we have ACTUAL temperatures to validate it against. And we just don't have such temperature data beyond about 150 years ago.

I am acutely aware of the validity issue because it lay at the heart of my own research into psychometrics. I was attempting in my work something just as daunting as what paleoclimatologists try to do. I was trying to put numbers to human attitudes and personalities.

One normally does that via a questionnaire. One uses questionnaires as proxies for what people are thinking. But how do you know that the answers to your questionnaire reflect anything real? You don't -- unless you seek some sort of validation for the measure you have constructed. You need some objective or independent data to compare your questionnaire answers with. And in my career I was a demon about insisting on such external validation.

Many of my colleagues were more insouciant however and took the questionnaire answers they had at face value. As a result I often was able to point out that they had got it wrong and that their research could not support the conclusions that the author concerned had drawn from it. I got a lot of papers published in the academic journals by pointing out such follies.

So if I had been in Briffa's shoes and found that the actual temperature record for the 20th century contradicted what my proxy data seemed to be showing, I would have concluded that the proxy was invalid and could not be used to support any conclusions. That is what any honest scientist would have done. Briffa, however, ignored the glaring invalidity of his proxy data and pretended to draw conclusions about temperatures for the last 1,000 years or so from it.

So from my perspective as a specialist in measurement, I can see no way of drawing sound conclusions about temperature from ANY proxy data so far available. The whole Warmist enterprise is an edifice built on sand.

Being a good scientist, however, I am going to specify what a valid temperature proxy would show. It would show the Roman warm period as warmest of all for the last 2500 years (when Hannibal took elephants over the Alps in WINTER and grapes grew in Northern England). It would show the Medieval Warm period as warmer than today (when Vikings farmed in Greenland). And it would show temperatures over the last 200 years as essentially flat (as even the Warmists claim a temperature rise of less than one degree Celsius over that period). I know of no such proxy in existence so far.

Given the inherently coarse resolution of proxies, it is in fact doubtful that any proxy COULD do what Warmists ask of it. Few people seem to realize that the graphs of leaping temperature that Warmists produce are calibrated in tenths of one degree. It may be possible to extract that degree of precision from thermometers but asking it of proxies is drawing a very long bow indeed.

I will stick with the well-established facts of history and conclude that present-day temperatures are in no way exceptionally warm. Publius Cornelius Scipio could well have made that sort of complaint but we cannot -- JR

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Blogrolling Problems (Bumped)

From Blogrolling News & Status:

Update on BlogRolling

We’re aware that there is an issue with BlogRolling blogrolls causing some browsers to display a security warning.

There’s nothing really wrong with BlogRolling itself but the way we connect your blog to the sites in your blogroll makes some security algorithms think there is.

If you find yourself in this situation, we recommend you remove the Blogrolling code from your site.

We’re probably going to be shutting the service down soon. We’ll post more information here and on our Twitter account (@blogrolling) as we decide on next steps.

We’re hoping we can give you enough time to get any data you need out of your blogrolling account before we shut down, but if you really need that data, you might want to get it now just in case.

Why aren’t we just fixing it and letting you continue using the service?

BlogRolling has largely been on auto-pilot for the last six months or so. The people who built it for us don’t work for us anymore. Even though it doesn’t make us any money, we wanted to keep it running because we know folks like it. But we’re not really comfortable with the code causing security warnings and that means it’s probably time for the service to end.

Thanks for your support. Stay tuned for more details in the next few days.

I'd suggest that the playing of "Taps" would be appropriate.

Florida Police Chief Suspended Over Racist Joke E-mails

Horrors: Jokes about Democrats, President Obama and women!

"Wilton Manors' police chief's choice in humor wasn't funny to his bosses. Now the joke is on Richard Perez. The city's top cop has suspended 30 days without pay after an investigation concluded Perez sent inappropriate e-mails from his city account, city officials ruled Friday.

Perez came under fire after a look into his e-mail account revealed dozens of racially insensitive jokes and disparaging jokes about Democrats, President Barack Obama and women.

The punishment was based on the "derogatory, culturally insensitive and racially charged content of the emails," City Manager Joseph Gallegos wrote in a press release.

Here is one of the many offensive Jokes Perez forwarded to his command staff and other police officers. Some even contained the N-word.

“Dwayne pimps 3 ho's. If the price is $85 per trick, how many tricks per day must each ho turn to support Dwayne's $800 per day Crack habit?” reads that e-mail.

Perez apologized and said there was no excuse for his actions. He must also undergo racial and cultural sensitivity training

Source

Maybe city officials were embarrassed that the math required was too hard for them. Note that there is nothing that is explicitly offensive or racist in the emails. If a name less typical of blacks than "Dwayne" were used, it might just be an exercise in arithmetic. And if "George Bush" were used instead of "Dwayne" it would no doubt have been seen as hilarious.

So what the police chief is being punished for is an allusion to a truth: That blacks are disproportionately involved in crack and prostitution. It is a sad day when ANY truth is "incorrect"

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Texas Woman Indicted for Child Sex Assault

(Bryan, Texas) A 43-year-old College Station woman, Elizabeth Price, has been indicted by a grand jury on two counts of sexual assault of a child stemming from allegations that she had sex with a friend's 16-year-old son.

The teen says he had gone over to Price's home in January of this year to play with her son. In a statement to police the teenager says Price gave him tequila shots to drink. After two, he said he went to the guest room to go to sleep. He says an hour later Price came in and had oral sex with him.

The 16 year old says three weeks later he went back over and this time Price gave him several cokes with bourbon along with two bourbon shots.

Again, the teen says he went to bed only to find Price back in the bedroom. The teen told police this time Price had sexual intercourse with him.

In May, Price reportedly slit her wrists with a blade, presumably prompted by remorse for engaging in sex with the teen.

Delaware Babysitter Accused of Raping Boy, 11

(Dover, Delaware) A 19-year-old Felton, DE babysitter, Cassandra Epperson, was arrested this week for allegedly engaging in sex with an 11-year-old boy she was caring for.

Epperson has been charged with rape.

The 11-year-old boy told investigators he was watching television with his siblings and got up to go to the bathroom in the rear of the home near the back door.

The baby sitter followed him into the bathroom, "pulled down her pants and underwear" and told the boy to do the same, police said in court records.

When the boy refused, Epperson told him that she would "tell his mom," without giving any specifics.

The boy did not tell his mother what happened for a week.

Epperson was booked into custody and released on $2,000 secured bail.