Toronto mayor Miller came to Giambrone’s aid today saying “The government has no business in the bedroom of the nation” (I know, highly original).

Excuse me, if I was living in Toronto, and was headed for the polls this fall, I’d say: “I would  like to know whether I am voting for a nice, upstanding man with integrity or a lying, cheating sleaze ball.”

But I don’t live in Toronto, so I won’t say that.

Here is today’s Ottawa Citizen front page:

Can you find him? Can you?

I’ll enlarge the section I’m talking about:

‘Nuff said…

Randall Denley had a great column in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday: Magic money just a McGuinty trick about Dalton’s new found money to help those poor Nortel employees who lost their pensions just before there happens to be a by election in their riding.

He writes:

Ottawa West-Nepean Liberal candidate Bob Chiarelli wished that the provincial government had done something to help angry Nortel pensioners who live in his riding. Presto, no sooner had Chiarelli made his wish than Finance Minister Dwight Duncan made it a reality. And on a Sunday, too.

and:

In April of last year, the premier said he just couldn’t guarantee help for the Nortel pensioners. There was no by election then, of course.

Randall fails to mention though, the same thing happened a few years back with hospital funding in Toronto when Georgie Smitherman needed to be elected in his riding.

Earlier this week, to the question if this is just vote buying in the eyes of the voters, Dalton replied arrogantly: “the voters of Ontario will have a chance to let us know how they feel come election time” [paraphrased]. Well, the “voters of Ontario” will only be able to vote on this nearly two years from now (and we all know how long the memory of the average Ontario voter lasts), and the voters in the West-Nepean riding sure aren’t as objective as the rest of us, now are they?

Yes, I finally did it. I installed a new theme for my blog. Functionally it is working, although there’s still a lot of tweaking to do. But I figured three days is enough to be down…

The Photo and Pages sections are being worked on the coming weeks, so keep checking back to see the final result. All other sections will be worked on as well.

Anyway, don’t hesitate to let me know what you think. (be kind).

Discuss.

Front page news today in Holland’s arguably most left newspaper De Volkskrant: “Scientists shocked by attack from minister Cramer” after Holland’s environment minister Cramer said she would not accept “any more mistakes” in the IPCC Fouth Assessment Report.

After freaking out at the glacier mistake last week (“Politicians Furious After Yet Another Blunder in the IPCC Report“) , the minister could not accept the IPCC report made such a huge mistake by reporting that 55% of The Netherlands is below sea level, when in fact it is 26%. (The additional 29% is at risk of flooding from rivers). Of course, the leftist newspaper quotes a number of scientists that claim it is merely an honest mistake.

The newspaper adds:

Climate sceptics see this mistake (on one of the three thousand pages in the report) as proof that the IPCC is operating unscientifically.

Minister Cramer is calling for a thorough enquiry. Her fellow party MP Samdon is going further in calling for a resignation of IPCC boss Pachauri.

It is heartening to see that even leftist politicians in Europe are starting to question the IPCC report, even though we’ll have to wait longer for the media to follow suit.

FEB 5 UPDATE: The Dutch government has now officially asked the IPCC to explain their numbers.

After Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pauchaurigate now comes Greenpeacegate. The Global Warming movement is unraveling faster than the North Pole is supposed to be melting. As Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org writes, it is hard to find out where greenpeace ends and the IPCC starts:the IPCC reports has a large number of “peer reviewed” references to  that seem to come from Greenpeace flyers and other un-reviewed Greenpeace literature.

Donna writes:

When discussing solar energy elsewhere, the report references two Greenpeace documents in one sentence. Here it uses a Greenpeace paper as its sole means of documenting where the “main wind-energy investments” are located globally (Wind).

She continues:

The expert reviewers who had input into just one portion (Working Group III) of the IPCC report are listed in this 8-page PDF. They include three Greenpeace employees, two Friends of the Earth representatives, two Climate Action Network reps, and a person each from activist organizations WWF International, Environmental Defense, and the David Suzuki Foundation.

And:

In short, Sawyer’s [seasoned campaigner on board Greenpeace boats and a tireless lobbyist] career has focused on political activism and environmental lobbying. How does that qualify him to be an IPCC “scientific expert reviewer”?

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report has been proven to be the greatest work of fiction since the french included vows of fidelity in their marriage service [quote: Edmund Blackadder].

The next time you grab your digital camera, phone or PDA to browse the ‘Net or talk to your friends, or control your fridge, or whatever you do with your phone, I want you to think of the two people who made it possible: Professor Steve Furber, and Sophie Wilson (formerly Roger Wilson). Back in the early eighties, these two people, with no team or money, developed the original ARM1 microprocessor chip, the predecessor of the StrongARM chip, which core is now used in over 90% of the world’s hand-held devices. Without their work, there would not have been such an explosion in hand held devices as we have seen in the past ten years. While Intel and IBM just wanted to make bigger and more powerful chips, Steve and Sophie set out to make the chip smaller and less power hungry for Acorn Computer‘s new microcomputer. Steve tells this story:

“Acorn Computer realised that it needed a 16-bit microprocessor instead of an 8-bit, for its microcomputer which had been adopted as the BBC Micro. Acorn CEO Hermann Hauser asked Intel if they could license the 286 but Intel said No.”

There were, however, other 16-bit microprocessors, and the job of evaluating them fell to Furber.

“We looked at National Semiconductor’s and Motorola’s but they were too slow “, says Furber. The obvious answer was to design their own but this looked daunting.

“The general view was that microprocessors had a mystique – that they were designed by very special people”, says Furber, “I’d never designed a microprocessor, and everything I knew about them I’d learned at the Cambridge University Microprocessor Group where people met to make computers for fun. We knew that it had taken National 200 years of development time to build their 16-bit microprocessor, and Acorn couldn’t afford that – we only had 300 people at the time.”

“Then we came across the Berkeley RISC. A group of graduate students had built a microprocessor with only a tiny percentage of the resources used by National. In late 1983, I started working closely with Sophie Wilson who had developed all the versions of BASIC for the BBC Micro.”

“Sophie and I went on a trip to Phoenix to the Western Design Centre (an independent microprocessor design house which designed the 6502)”, remembers Furber, “we found it to be a cottage industry working in a bungalow in a back street. That gave us confidence. Sophie started playing with instruction set design. Our mentality was: ‘Let’s have a go at building a microprocessor’.”

The next problem was to persuade the boss. “Hermann was a great guy to work for ” says Furber, “if he had confidence in you technically he’d back a crazy idea. Building our own microprocessor was a crazy idea – but he backed it.”

“Steve is one of the brightest guys I’ve ever worked with – brilliant ” says Hauser, “and when we decided to do a microprocessor on our own I made two great decisions – I gave them two things which National, Intel and Motorola had never given their design teams: the first was no money; the second was no people. The only way they could do it was to keep it really simple.”

Furber defined the architecture while Sophie developed the instruction set. “While IBM spent months simulating their instruction sets on large mainframes, Sophie did it all in her brain,” remembers Hauser.

It was the birth of a microprocessor phenomenon – a chip which did the same amount of work as other 16-bit microprocessors but used one tenth of their transistors – and consequently one tenth of their electricity.

“At 1pm on April 13th 1984, the first ARM microprocessors arrived back from the manufacturer – Plessey”, recalls Furber, “they were put straight into the development system which was fired up with a tweak or two and, at 3 pm, the screen displayed: ‘Hello World, I am ARM’.”

JANUARY 27 UPDATE: Apple just unveiled iPad tablet computer powered by, you guessed it, a customized A4 chip based on a licensed ARM core.

Mr. McGuinty announced his latest project today: 7 billion dollars goes to South Korea, for which a consortium led by Samsung will build and set up wind and solar farms across Ontario. The government has guaranteed them to pay above-market prices for green power. For all this, they’ll create 15,000 jobs.

So, to recap, we’re paying Samsung to build unproven wind and solar farms, and we’ll be buying over-priced power from them after. In addition, we paid nearly half a million dollars for each job created.

How does this help us?

I suppose the commercial is right: there is no place like McGuinty’s Ontario…

A brand new garage for Ottawa’s OC Transpo’s bus fleet: $29 million.

Oh, the columns are placed so that our articulate busses can’t turn in it, better change the design while we’re building it: add $30 million.

Jeepers, we forgot: we have double-deckers too: raise the ceiling and add another $30 million.

Total: $97+ million dollars. For a garage.

Are you all nuts there at city hall?

Once again, the IPCC was proven WRONG on a major issue regarding its claim that the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” in the Fourth Assessment Report. In fact, the scientist that initially informed the IPCC of the glaciers disappearing, immediately retracted his statement after he issued it,  months before the Fourth Assessment Report came out back in 2007. They had ample time to take it out, but I suppose the exposed Himalayas was a great mental image, not to be wasted.

The Fourth Assessment Report said the evidence for global warming was now “unequivocal,” the chief source for it was man-made and there were already signs, of which glacial melt was one. It was this publication that kicked the world into action and implement carbon caps, carbon trading schemes, and greenhouse gas reductions in nearly every developed nation in the world.

The IPCC is only now launching a probe, three years after the fact, and quickly adds that “the evidence of the report remained incontrovertible. I am careful in saying this, because immediately people will again engage in IPCC bashing, which would be wrong.” (Georg Kaser of the Geography Institute at Austria’s University of Innsbruck). Three years later, the damage has been done. Billions upon billions of dollars have been wasted as a result of this fraudulent report.

Once again the media mainly ignores this fact, and even if the Ottawa Citizen reports on it, the article is strewn with “Attack by skeptics” and “hacked emails” and “IPCC bashing”. Even the headline does not reflect badly on the IPCC: UN climate body to probe Himalayan glacier forecast. I could have come up with a more accurate headline, say: IPCC admits Fourth Assessment Report based on false data–apologizes to world for wasting billions of dollars.

I am getting pretty tired of this Global Warming crowd: time after time they have been proven to fudge the numbers, lie, cheat, make up numbers, manipulate global temperature data and yet half the world still follows them blindly.

It’s time our own government puts a stop to this sham, and stop following anything the IPCC or UN does on the climate front.

This is getting rediculous.