an appropriate link, as I wish jo & family & all readers a very happy New Year.
despite being utterly wrong about 2016, BBC feels their top correspondents can provide ***”ESSENTIAL TIPS” about 2017!
the summary doesn’t even mention they virtually all predicted a Hillary win. Paris Agreement is the only CAGW topic they discuss and one of them says Trump won’t walk away from it because that would leave Chinas as LEADER OF THE CAGE WORLD. BBC propaganda is so predictable:
30 Dec: AUDIO: 48mins: BBC Look Ahead: Correspondents Look Ahead
Owen Bennett-Jones is joined by a group of senior BBC journalists to forecast what is likely to happen over the coming year.
***Last time they got together they were firmly predicting that Marco Rubio would become the Republican presidential candidate – and that Britain was likely to vote to stay in the EU. So as the saying goes, making predictions is a tricky business…especially about the future.
Yet our experts can at least lay out the parameters for what is likely to happen in the spheres of geopolitics, economics and society more widely – and give us ***essential tips on what and who to look out for in 2017. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b085z5jp
there’s an attempt to suggest BBC North American correspondent, Jon Sopel, kind of predicted something or other about Trump; however:
AUDIO: 20 Oct: HeatSt: BBC Bias As America Editor Praises ‘Extraordinary’ Hillary Clinton
BBC North America editor Jon Sopel could hardly contain himself when giving his summary of last night’s presidential debate.
Sopel’s colleagues have long suspected that he leans to the left.
And on the strength of his performance on the Today programme this morning they’d be forgiven for doing so:
He lavished praise upon Hillary Clinton so enthusiastically that he almost sounded as though he was a paid advocate of the Democratic Party candidate:
“I think that Hillary Clinton was extraordinarily tactically astute in what she was trying to do which was to say ‘I’m appealing to all Americans, I want to end division.’ She spoke favourably about Ronald Reagan at times. You could almost see the conscious appeal that she was trying to make in sometimes unsubtle ways to get that centrist voter.”
19 Nov: ConservativeWoman: Kathy Gyngell: The BBC seems to think it is running for election against Trump
BBC US correspondent Jon Sopel described Trump as a ‘street fighter insurgent’ campaigning ‘with a flame thrower and a flick knife’ – metaphors which questioned the validity of his victory.
But why had the BBC called it wrong? Were they as out of touch as some critics had suggested, Nick Robinson ventured…
Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist, and executive chairman of Breitbart, they immediately cast as a ‘right-wing firebrand’…
On Tuesday, another attack line on Trump allies opened up – with the appointment of a notorious climate change sceptic Myron Ebell to the top environment job on Trump’s transition team. Today (program) was having a field day. Trump’s having ‘knife fights’ with his aides, the BBC’s US correspondent Jon Sopel gleefully told them, literally snorting with derision.
Trump’s team was already in tatters, Today insisted…
Wednesday’s episode found Lady Brooke (aka Sarah Montague) at the helm. Drawing on Bernie Sanders’s support she as good as declared all-out war on Trump…
Mark Steyn’s insight is pertinent here. Once cast as haters, he says, “you de-legitimise their votes. And, if you de-legitimise their votes, you de-legitimise the very idea of representative government”.
This is what they tried this week with Steve Bannon. They failed. But I fear it is just a setback in what will go down as one of the most shameful periods in the BBC’s once proud history. http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/kathy-gyngell-the-bbc-seems-to-think-it-is-running-for-election-against-trump/
Just thinking about one of the most memorable New Year Eves I’ve spent. On 31 December 1969 my dad took delivery of a brand new Kingswood station wagon at Elizabeth, a northern suburb of Adelaide and all seven of us did the trip to Baroota, north of Port Pirie, to visit our friends who were former next door neighbours in Mt Gambier. As the oldest of five children I got to sit between mum and dad in the front seat. Seat belts were not compulsory in those days although dad had them installed when we got back to the “Mount”. That was the car in which I learned to drive the next year. The radio was counting down the top 100 songs of the sixties and the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” was number 1, one of their rare hits they did not write.
The year 1969 was arguably the most incredible in history because on July 20/21, depending on which country one lived, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon and Mike Collins orbited above them. Then in November Apollo 12 was also most successful and I delight in telling my sons that Mr Bean walked on the Moon!
Happy New Year to Jo, David and family and all the Mods and to all readers of this fantastic Blog.
1969 was indeed a great year,: it was the year I met my wife just a week before the moon landing and I spent New Years eve in Nuku, a village in New Guinea, just out of Aitape.
No Holden , but some interesting rides in the aircraft then being used.
In 1973 I once had the opportunity of being flown into Kerowagi from Kundiawa by a small light aircraft, probably a Cessna, before localisation.
The previous week a light aircraft had crashed flying to this airstrip, one of the once a week total losses that occurred in Papua New Guinea.
Sitting in the front of the aircraft I had a perfect view of the terrain, green and forbidding.
The problem for the last aircraft was 10 10ths cloud cover.
Cloud rolled in obscuring the landing strip.
The chickens in baskets in the back did not seem too concerned.
The pilot was very cheerful pointing to a small gap in the clouds that would be over where he thought the air strip was.
He was right. That’s how I tell the tale.
I think my flights were Britten Norman Islanders inland but a Fokker I was in going from PM to Wewak had an emergency landing on the east coast due to a nose wheel light issue.
See, I’ve forgotten the name of the place.
That’s what happens when you spend an hour circling over a town to burn up fuel.
Britten Norman Islander seems to me to be unlikely. Could have been but I do not remember any Islanders in PNG at that time. A twin engined Piaggio seems to me to be more likely.
There was one referred to as a Helo, it had enormous flaps and seemed almost to hover it was going so slow. Seemed to be inspired by the FiesslerStorch.
Never flew in it but saw it land at, I think, Telefomin.
No Peter, I was visiting a student from Goroka teachers college at the time. We were introduced through The university I was studying at. Spent 3 weeks in the village and a day or so in Port Moresby going in and out.
Nuku, for RW, has a steep sloping airstrip, but plenty of room to turn in front the hill and adjust. The strip compensated for slope by having plenty of length.
2016 was a year of triumph for the “basket of deplorables”. They sent the wannabe masters of the universe to the edges of the nation. The makers at the center said ” NO a Thousand Times NO” to the takers. The takers who pretend to know what is best for everyone else but who produce nothing but more government. Then demand the makers pay for it all.
2017 has a good prospect of having a recovery of the idea that government is servant and the individual is sovereign over his own life. Which means the individual is to be left alone to do, to associate, and to trade voluntarily with others of like mind without force or government mandate. At least now we have a hope of a real future rather than merely hoping that we will have some change left over after the government is done with us.
and the rusted on voters and deluded conservatives. As the political classes start to care about themselves and chase the fringe dwellers, it is wise to consider that people are very frustrated by politicians who say one thing and do another, who conspire to make sure the people you want are not the leaders, from Hilary’s hatchet job on Sanders, Corbyn’s elimination of rivals and Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten’s replay of the assassination of Julius Ceasar. The democratic world is hungry for people who want to represent the people, not look after their own fame and fortune. People who do not need the money. It was appalling that the Clinton’s excuse for their money train was that they left the White House broke? Not a bad free holiday house with a free helicopter service. In Victoria we saw a minister sending his puppies around the state by government chauffeur and a speaker of Federal parliament on $400K pa using a helicopter for party business.
It is the overwhelming idea that the voters exist for the politicians which rankles. As Abbott says, Climate Science is crap. No who else in Australian politics is prepared to say that? Can we have our PM back this year?
A happy new year to Jo, David and all the readers of this blog. A special thanks for the mental health support over the years prior to 2016 when it felt that I was the only one who saw that the emperor had no clothes. But although practicalities required that most of the conversation here was scientific it was lovely to know I wasn’t the only one with right wing ideas – interestingly when I do questionnaires about where I am on the political spectrum Aussies and New Zealand ones have me being quite extreme right wing but the US ones I’ve done have me as centrist – right in the middle! Its also been lovely to have some political comment these last months.
So all the best to everyone here. And may the move away from the Marxist leftie ideology continue in the west and occur strongly here in Australia. Hopefully we will get some decent Liberal leadership along the way.
And despite the media trumpeting that this year was once again the hottest EVA, this is the coolest most comfortable summer I’ve had in Perth since I arrived in 2000.
Happy new year and best wishes to Jo and David, and to all those who make this site a ‘must-see’ destination for anyone who appreciate genuine science and engineering endeavours.
2016 was not my best year by a long shot, so I am looking at 2017 with optimism and anticipation, though may not be saying that once the hangover kicks in!.
Peru volcanoes explode into life triggering state of emergency and MASS EVACUATION
Worryingly, Peru is suffering from two active volcanoes at the same time, the first time this has occurred in recorded history.
Alarmists have reason to fear,
That their cause could well plummet next year,
Like Berlin’s pulled down wall,
Or Humpty’s great fall,
Giving skeptics good reason to cheer.
And to you Phillip. After all the time and effort you have put into fighting the Green Blob it must be wonderful seeing it coming to the end.
Some one posted elsewhere about the collapse of the (previously dominant) Phlogiston theory in the eighteenth century, and now we get to see another eighteenth century theory collapse. I hope you keep well and can really enjoy the end of this fr**d.
My goal this year is to start a job agency that specializes in the needs of unemployed climate “scientists.” My crystal ball says it will be a booming market.
Besides, I love the challenge of finding work for those that probably have never put in an honest day’s labor their entire lives.
Perhaps you could expand the agency to include those employed building solar and wind farms, mainly honest folk working for snake oil salesmen spruiking their wares in high places.
May 2017 bring an end to 72 years (1945-2017) of misuse of nuclear physics to frighten the public and hide from the public our remarkably good fortune at living on a water-covered planet exactly 1 AU (astronomical unit) from the pulsar that birthed the world five billion years (5 Ga) ago, . . .
as the late Professor Paul Kazuo Kuroda (1917 – 2001), realized while standing in the ruins of Hiroshima in Aug 1945:
I would like to second that except that our resident trolls won’t find the new year at all enjoyable. Still they have always preached gloom and doom, so happy gall and wormword for Frank, David Appell, Twinotter, Julian and Tristian.
raYes may this be a happy and prosperous new year for Jo David and all the polite sceptical commenters who frequent this site. May the gang of five (as defined by Graeme No.3) curse thye winter chills , and may the new year see the return of the Griss.
HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone , friend or foe , although we sceptics don’t have real enemies do we , anyway here is George Thorogood with some of the greatest names in rocking blues , hohttps://youtu.be/129Ek_aAaLsw many can you name ; enjoy
I go though news sites to get here and as always there is some rubbish news pushing the regressive progressives, the only people who care. This morning it is about how the Russians have malware on US power distributor computers. Really? Of course this only happened after Hilary lost the election. Only since the election have the Russians had spies in the US, not China. The US of course has no spies in Russia or agents around the world.
Also nothing to do with the ceasefire in Syria where the Turks and Russians have brought peace to the country by not involving the people trying to oust Assad, openly the US and Saudis. Now who is the aggressor again? It’s not as if the Turks and Russians are great friends with a Russian jet shot down and the Russian ambassador shot last week but having een the fall of Hussain, Gadaffi, Mubarek and more, the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East is the funding and arming of rebel groups led by people like Osama Bin Laden. All in the name of freedom. What sort of freedom is there in these countries? Tunisia for example? Who withdrew US troops from Iraq? Who enabled the establishment of a new Middle East Caliphate from Kabul to Tunisia? History will not deal kindly with Obama and his friends.
Now he has three weeks to bring down the Russias. As Trump says, Putin is not taking the bait and leaving Obama look like the lame duck he is.
Obama’s other great bandwagon is Climate Change. What can the Democrats do by Presidential decree between now and January 20th, short of declaring war on someone?
What can Obama do that Trump cannot easily undo? The world can only be thankful Putin is not taking the bait. It is thinkable that Obama is trying to create a crisis which means he stays in power.
In this Observer article 2 days ago Maria Zakharova, an official representative of the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs says,
“They are once again trying to frighten us with the widening of anti-Russian sanctions, with measures of ‘diplomatic nature,’ and even with the sabotage of our computer systems…Frankly, we are sick and tired of the outright lies about ‘Russian hackers’ that continue to pour down in the United States from the very top. The Obama Administration launched this disinformation half a year ago in an attempt to support the position of their desired candidate for the November Presidential elections. Having not achieved their desired outcome, now they are looking for the justification of their failure and, doubling their efforts, they are taking revenge on the Russian-American relations.”
and Dmitry Kiselyov from the same article,
“Now, with all of his might, Obama tries to spoil everything everywhere for the President-elect Trump. And with every day, his behavior gets worse and worse. It seems that on the eve of the inauguration—January, 20—he will have nothing else left to do for himself but to break all the windows in the White House and to leave behind a pile [of s**t] on the steps.”
I think Trump and being incredibly annoying in the years after 20/01/2017 will be Obama’s legacies.
2016 soon to be declared the hottest year ever recorded.
Bitter cold and record snow across northern continents will be declared part of global warming due to unusual polar vortex all NOW predicted by coupled GCMs. AND the albedo feedback affect of snow will be declared as being previously overstated in the models. It is getting tougher to spin the virtues of climate models.
It appears that 2017 could be the year CO2 gets a reprieve from its status as a pollutant.
Take a bath tub. Use one of those really nice big ones with the big feet and about twice the capacity of the new fancy ones- this is your atmosphere. Turn on the water and get it running nice and warm with lots of volume – this is your CO2 natural source. Open the drain. This is your natural CO2 sink. Adjust the source to about match the sink. Put two 2 year old children into the tub to simulate the coupled chaotic activity (one could be planetary orbital eccentricity and the other cosmic rays). Give one of the kids a wire strainer and demonstrate the drag you can feel when it is placed over drain. This is natural variability of the sink. Show the other one the neat noise changes you can make by twisting the faucet handles (the old tubs all had two). This is the natural variability in the source. Now get a squirt gun and start using it to fill the tub. This is CO2 from fossil fuel combustion. Measure the average depth of the water every half hour. To be scientific make sure both kids are sitting down when you measure. If the depth is increasing over time you can claim that the squirt gun has caused it all and pretty soon the tub will overflow if we don’t stop with the squirting. Or you could question that claim and think the imbalance of the source and sink that was effected by trading places
because it was “MY TURN” had more to do with it. Who wants to bet the tub will fill and spill before it drains dry?
“Here’s to hoping the Age of Trump will herald the demise of climate change dogma, and acceptance of a broader range of perspectives in climate science and our policy options,” said Georgia Tech scientist Judith Curry.
Happy New Year to Jo, David and the “wains”. Thank you for a great year on this site. This year should be a bobby dazzler. And, David, I hope you get your papers published at last.
New Year’s Resolution for FakeNewsMSM – stop it now:
31 Dec: TheIntercept: Glenn Greenwald: Russia Hysteria Infects WashPost Again: False Story About Hacking U.S. Electric Grid
The first sentence of the article directly linked this cyberattack to alleged Russian hacking of the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta — what is now routinely referred to as “Russian hacking of our election” — by referencing the code name revealed on Wednesday by the Obama administration when it announced sanctions on Russian officials: “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials.”…
The media reactions, as Alex Pfeiffer documents, were exactly what one would expect: hysterical, alarmist proclamations of Putin’s menacing evil…
The Post’s story also predictably and very rapidly infected other large media outlets. Reuters thus told its readers around the world: “A malware code associated with Russian hackers has reportedly been detected within the system of a Vermont electric utility.”…
29 Dec: The Intercept: Glenn Greenwald: The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False
(updated below [Fri.])
The shoddy and misleading Guardian article, written by Ben Jacobs, was published on December 24. It made two primary claims — both of which are demonstrably false. The first false claim was hyped in the article’s headline: “Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview.” This claim was repeated in the first paragraph of the article: “Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has offered guarded praise of Donald Trump. …”…
Those claims are made up.
Despite how much online attention it received, Jacobs’s Guardian article contained no original reporting. Indeed, it did nothing but purport to summarize the work of an actually diligent journalist: Stefania Maurizi of the Italian daily la Repubblica, who traveled to London and conducted the interview with Assange. Maurizi’s interview was conducted in English, and la Repubblica published the transcript online. Jacobs’s “work” consisted of nothing other than purporting to re-write the parts of that interview he wanted to highlight, so that he and The Guardian could receive the traffic for her work…
Ever since the Guardian article was published and went viral, Maurizi has repeatedly objected to the false claims being made about what Assange said in their interview. But while Western journalists keep re-tweeting and sharing The Guardian’s second-hand summary of this interview, they completely ignore Maurizi’s protests — for reasons that are both noxious and revealing…
But, like so much online fake news, this was a fraud that had a huge impact, as The Guardian and Jacobs surely knew would happen…
31 Dec: ABC America: Trump Ditches Media for Golf Game by Jill Colvin, Associated Press
President-elect Donald Trump has ditched his press pool once again — this time traveling to play golf at his club in Jupiter, Florida, without a pool of journalists on hand ***to ensure the public has knowledge of his whereabouts…
A club member posted a photo on Twitter of Trump on the greens Saturday morning…
Trump, both as a candidate and during the transition, has often scoffed at tradition, such as allowing a group of reporters to follow him at all times, to ensure the public knows where he is. Not long after his election, Trump went out to dinner with his family in Manhattan without informing the pool of his whereabouts.
The practice is meant to ensure that journalists are on hand to witness, on behalf of the public, the activities of the president or president-elect, rather than relying on secondhand accounts.
The White House also depends on having journalists nearby at all times to relay the president’s first comments on breaking news…
being eagerly picked up worldwide, of course:
Donald Trump ditches press pool for golf game
The Australian-53 minutes ago
8 Dec: InvestorsBusinessDaily Editorial: Trump Owes The Media Nothing — Here’s Why
“His coverage was negative from the start and never came close to entering positive territory,” said Thomas E. Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard…
But the fact is, Democrats aside, even some in the media noticed how bad it was.
As The Hill’s Joe Concha noted on Oct. 17: “The broadcast evening news programs on ABC, NBC and CBS covered allegations against Trump by several women who claim he sexually assaulted them for more than 23 minutes combined on Thursday night.”
But, he went on, “revelations in the WikiLeaks email dump of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — which included derogatory comments by senior campaign officials about Catholics, Latinos and the NAACP, sympathy for Wall Street, advocation for open borders and blatant examples of media collusion with said campaign — got a whole 1 minute and 7 seconds combined.
“Ratio of negative coverage of Trump vs. Clinton: 23:1.
“In print on Thursday, it was no better. The New York Times — known as the paper of record — had 11 negative stories on Trump, including one in the sports section. But zero on Clinton/WikiLeaks.
“Ratio: 11:0.”
Yes, it was that one-sided.
But, ironically, it seems to have worked in Trump’s favor… http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/trump-owes-the-media-nothing-heres-why/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PoliticRss+%28Politic+RSS%29
“The broadcast evening news programs on ABC, NBC and CBS covered allegations against Trump by several women who claim he sexually assaulted them for more than 23 minutes combined on Thursday night.”
Either Trump is a hell of a stud, or that is shocking sentence construction. I despair of modern journalists, their command of the English language, especially syntax, is abysmal.
Personally, I’m glad to be quit of 2016. The reasons are both personal and plain old political. Let us work together to make the world a better place in 2017.
Jo and David, without knowing what he future will hold in store I’m still willing to predict that you two will have been big contributors to that better 2017.
Having problems understanding GCM’s.
Do the latest models actually work?
Do we wait 20 years to find out?
Or are we doomed to have them re tuned to fit the past?
Has the CSIRO published a model for Australian climatic zones that works and we can test?
We have already found that the one predicting the ‘dams will dry’ has not eventuated.
Can anyone give me a link that shows the method of homogenisation that used the average temperature of a number of sites, including Rutherglen and Hillston to be a useful climatic representation of the real climate states of South Eastern Australia?
As always the best to all readers and contributors on this site.
May you live long and prosper.
The CSIRO Climate Science Centre needs more funds:
“Reliable decadal climate forecasts would enable decision-makers in agriculture, energy, water, health, financial, insurance and other sectors to manage the risks and opportunities arising from decadal variations in climate. Effective adaptation requires regional information on climate variability and change, and changes in extreme events like floods and droughts, on decadal time-scales. But anticipating the climate of the coming decades is a difficult scientific challenge, in part because both natural climate variability and anthropogenic climate change influence climate on these timescales. A team of 15 researchers at the Centre will develop and test a prototype decadal forecasting system, a first for Australia”.
‘Scientists at The Collaboration for Australian Weather and Climate Research, a partnership between CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, have developed Australia’s next generation climate model: the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS).”
“One of the major achievements of ACCESS is the improvement of weather forecasts. It is now possible to forecast the weather three days ahead with the same level of accuracy as for two-day forecasts previously. This makes for greater certainty in planning and responding to weather events.”
WOW!! With a massive super computer they can now forecast three days ahead. But they can publish unvalidated claims of their simulations for the next 100 years. Pull the other one.
Thanks for this.
Well above my pay scale.
When I ever retire it will make interesting work.
The problem that emerged for us Aussies was that the GCMS that we were contributing, to got Australian Continental Climate change wrong.
When Al Gore said the North would dry, it got wetter.
When Prof Flannery said our dams would dry, it rained more and the dams filled.
When we asked politely for the method and code to work out homogenisation,particularly the Hillston/Rutherglen one, that conflates two climate zones, it is not clearly available.
I was given a link to it on Watts Up With That, but it does not work.
Hence my try here.
lets call it a New Year’s aspiration.
30 Dec: ConservativeTreehouse: sundance: 2016 Will Be Remembered as The Year “Media Polling” Corruption Was Exposed…
With election 2016 behind us, and before 2017 arrives, the truth behind the intentionally constructed deception must not simply fade back into the shadows.
***Never again should the American voter trust the polling presented by corporate media. Everything about it is a financed and manufactured fraud…
THE MEDIA POLLSTERS DIDN’T GET IT WRONG …
…THEY LIED.
The professional media polling agents knew exactly what the truth was…
***The same analytical tools available to us, and to those who were ridiculed for truth-telling, were available to them and many more. They did not get it wrong; they didn’t make mistakes. They chose to lie to the American electorate.
So lets name the most notorious liars so their names and organizations can forever be dispatched from the land where credibility is of value:…READ ON
COMMENT: CountryClassVulgarian: Bill Mitchell also did some great analysis into the fraud built in the polls. https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/12/30/2016-will-be-remembered-as-the-year-media-polling-corruption-was-exposed/
jo has a new thread, but this final FakeNews piece needs to go here.
FakeNewsNYT, the biggest pusher of the FakeNews meme, has no ethical concerns about employing the Podesta Emails-compromised Glenn Thrush, even tho they’re laying off staff, & FakeNewsWaPo Wemple is happy to report the following garbage, without recognising the irony:
12 Dec: WaPo: ***ERIK WEMPLE BLOG: Glenn Thrush on leaving Politico for the NYT: ‘You can’t be an eighth-year senior in high school’
Glenn Thrush, a veteran political reporter who has been with Politico since 2008, is leaving for the New York Times, as reported by Michael Calderone of the Huffington Post. In doing so, Thrush is sliding down a well-greased exit chute: New York Times standbys Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns have all made the same move in recent years…
In addition to serving as Politico’s chief political correspondent, he has been a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine. That latter function has allowed Thrush to assist in Politico’s turn toward slow-cooking feature stories with greater long-term resonance than the site’s early fare.
***A memorable long-form collaboration with Haberman in spring 2014 asked, “What Is Hillary Clinton Afraid Of?” Answer: The media — and the double-bylined piece foretold the Clinton campaign’s tortured relationship with news organizations in the 2016 campaign…
And along with Alex Isenstadt, he wrote about ***turmoil within the Trump campaign following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape…
“And there are growing signs that the GOP nominee is no longer competing just against Hillary Clinton, but against members of his own party who are withdrawing or reconsidering their reluctant endorsements, making Trump’s objective on Sunday less about reviving his candidacy than proving himself able to stop his party from completely abandoning him to the electoral wolves howling outside Trump Tower,” read the story …
The White House beat in the coming years will be a hothouse for reportorial inquiry…
In his Politico incarnation, Thrush used Twitter to throw some pointed short-form elbows at the incoming White House crew. Examples:…READ
Such tartness may not be bursting from Thrush’s account in the coming months…
Emailing habits may also undergo curtailment. As part of the WikiLeaks dump of emails pertaining to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, Thrush was put face to face with an email he’d sent to Podesta. He was seeking to check his reporting: “Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f****d up anything,” wrote Thrush…
Thrush joins a New York Times that is losing staff. Around 70 New York Times employees have taken buyouts, and layoffs are next. “It really is an incredibly painful situation,” says Thrush…
Addressing his work at the Times, Thrush says the newspaper will need to counter the “misstatements of fact” that come from President-elect Trump, though he credited the paper for already excelling on that front. “They view that increasingly as one of their responsibilities,” says Thrush…
(A MERE FIVE COMMENTS, ALL SCATHING OR MOCKING – was the blog post hidden away?) https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/12/12/glenn-thrush-on-leaving-politico-for-the-nyt-you-cant-be-an-eighth-year-senior-in-high-school/?utm_term=.73d7bc02909a
Wemple is quite the FakeNews character himself – check under “Career”:
some more accurate headlines Wemple could have used:
ZeroHedge: New York Times Hires Politico’s Self-Described “Hack” Who Sent Stories To Clinton For Approval
NY Times Hires Reporter Who Called Himself A ‘Hack’ | The Daily Caller (WORTH FINDING ONLINE AND READING)
NY Times hires ‘hack’ – Student News Daily
Breitbart: New York Times Hires Glenn Thrush After Wikileaks Humiliation
The New York Times also had its share of embarrassments from Wikileaks’ “Podesta Emails”:
• The paper provided interview questions to Bill Clinton before a live Q&A with columnist Nicholas Kristof.
• The campaign dictated what Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for the Times‘ magazine, could and could not print from an interview with Secretary Clinton.
• Clinton staffers said that political reporter Amy Chozick privately praised Hillary, “may as well have been sitting in her lap” at a private awards ceremony, and alerted the campaign that she was working on a story that could undermine a colleague’s investigative report based on the book Clinton Cash — authored by Peter Schweizer, a Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News…
Five minutes after announcing his move to the Times, Thrush sent a shoutout to a “friend” and veteran of the Clinton campaign…ETC http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/12/12/new-york-times-hires-glenn-thrush-wikileaks-humiliation/
Wemple, is this “the Clinton campaign’s tortured relationship with news organizations in the 2016 campaign” u and FakeNews hack Haberman wrote about?
10 Oct: The Intercept: EXCLUSIVE: New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship
by Glenn Greenwald & Lee Fang
Internal strategy documents and emails among Clinton staffers shed light on friendly and highly useful relationships between the campaign and various members of the U.S. media, as well as the campaign’s strategies for manipulating those relationships.
The emails were provided to The Intercept by the source identifying himself as Guccifer 2.0, who was reportedly responsible for prior significant hacks, including one that targeted the Democratic National Committee and resulted in the resignations of its top four officials. On Friday, Obama administration officials claimed that Russia’s “senior-most officials” were responsible for that hack and others, although they provided no evidence for that assertion…
One January 2015 strategy document — designed to plant stories on Clinton’s decision-making process about whether to run for president — singled out reporter ***Maggie Haberman, then of Politico, now covering the election for the New York Times, as a “friendly journalist” who has “teed up” stories for them in the past and “never disappointed” them… https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak-reveals-clinton-campaigns-cozy-press-relationship/
10 Oct: DailyWire: John Nolte: WikiLeaks Outs NYT Maggie Haberman as Clinton Operative
Maggie Haberman is one of the most dishonest journalists I have ever come across. Going back five years to when she was still with Politico, I have repeatedly exposed her lies and fraud. She is currently with the New York Times, and thanks to WikiLeaks, we now have incontrovertible proof that Haberman is nothing more than a spin doctor for Hillary Clinton and her campaign…
the most ironic part of the whole Russia helped Trump win the election fantasy by giving WikiLeaks the Podesta/DNC emails or whatever is the FakeNewsMSM wouldn’t even report on the emails, if u recall.
FakeNewsMSM would only ask who leaked them and say they might not be accurate. remember the idiot Cuomo on CNN telling his viewers they were not allowed to read them; that it was CNN’s job and then they would tell their viewers what was in them. lol.
Happy New Year to you, Ms Nova, and to Mr Evans, and I wish you both great success in the coming year, with more to follow.
Also, a Happy New Year to all the other “deplorables” who may lurk here, and even those who can only snipe – for whom it should be told, while the UK may be leaving the EU, you will still be able to get your regular fix of Nandos, so don’t get too upset (perhaps an obscure joke, especially to you in the extreme southern counties of England – check it out on Youtube).
The Happiest of New Years to you all from this “deplorable”. It is looking like it’s going to be one to remember! The countdown till when the real fun begins is:
I live 468 air miles WNW of Washington DC and upwind relative to the prevailing winds, but I think I still get a whiff of the smell of electrical motors overheating. I suspect that it’s paper shredders working overtime in DC. As Gail so aptly put it. It will be nice to not have to be forced to examine Obama’s nose hairs on a weekly basis.
A fantastic new year to one and all! The lefties don’t have a clue as to what is happening. Whenever when they try explaining it they usually fall very short and misread the situation. However I have a lot of faith in what will actually be achieved. So let’s look forward to a fantastic new year.
Haha, nice trolling there, Rod. Fooled me for a few seconds.
Still it says something, doesn’t it, when it is hard to tell the difference between a genuine Greens talking point and a parody twitter account like that one.
You did know it was a parody account and not the real Jill Stein before passing it on to us, right? 😉
1 Jan: Forbes: Kalev Leetaru: “Fake News” And how the Washington Post rewrote its story on Russian hacking of the power grid
On Friday the Washington Post sparked a wave of fear when it ran the breathless headline “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.” …
Yet, it turns out this narrative was false and as the chronology below will show, illustrates how effectively false and misleading news can ricochet through the global news echo chamber through the pages of top tier newspapers that fail to properly verify their facts…
The original article was posted online on the Washington Post’s website at 7:55PM EST. Somewhere between 9:24PM and 10:06PM the Post updated the article to indicate that multiple computer systems at the utility had been breached (“computers” plural), but that further data was still being collected…
Several paragraphs of additional material were added between 8PM and 10PM, claiming and contextualizing the breach as part of a broader campaign of Russian hacking against the US, including the DNC and Podesta email breaches…
Despite the article ballooning from 8 to 18 paragraphs, the publication date of the article remained unchanged and no editorial note was appended, meaning that a reader being forwarded a link to the article would have no way of knowing the article they were seeing was in any way changed from the original version published 2 hours prior…
The following morning, nearly 11 hours after changing the headline and rewriting the article to indicate that the grid itself was never breached and the “hack” was only an isolated laptop with malware, the Post still had not appended any kind of editorial note to indicate that it had significantly changed the focus of the article.
This is significant, as one driving force of fake news is that as much of 60% of the links shared on social media are shared based on the title alone, with the sharer not actually reading the article itself. Thus, the title assigned to an article becomes the story itself and the Post’s incorrect title meant that the story that spread virally through the national echo chamber was that the Russians had hacked into the US power grid…
Only after numerous outlets called out the Post’s changes did the newspaper finally append an editorial note ***at the very bottom of the article more than half a day later…
Yet, even this correction is not a true reflection of public facts as known. The utility indicated only that a laptop was found to contain malware that has previously been associated with Russian hackers. As many pointed out, the malware in question is actually available for purchase online, meaning anyone could have used it and its mere presence is not a guarantee of Russian government involvement. Moreover, a malware infection can come from many sources, including visiting malicious websites…
When I reached out to Kris Coratti, Vice President of Communications and Events for the Washington Post for comment, she responded that regarding the headline change, “Headlines aren’t written by story authors. When editors realized it overreached, as happens from time to time with headlines, it was corrected.” She also indicated that posting the editor’s note at the bottom of the article instead of the top was a mistake and indeed ***this was corrected shortly after my email to her inquiring about it… http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/#36a22e3b291e
***yes, the Editor’s Note now appears at the top of the article ONLINE, but this story was on the front page of WaPo print version 30 Dec, cont’d on page A4.
below does show the “absurd” new headline, as Greenwald called it – see comment #32, but the even worse original headline could have gone out on early editions for all I know:
Glenn Greenwald: Update on link comment #32 above: UPDATE: Just as The Guardian had to do just two days ago regarding its claim about WikiLeaks and Putin, the Washington Post has now added an editor’s note to its story acknowledging that its key claim was false:
“Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that ***so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid.”
Is it not very clear that journalistic standards are being casually dispensed with when the subject is Russia?
original WaPo headline: Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say.
was changed online to:
Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to US electrical grid security, officials say
Washington Post-30 Dec. 2016
big deal! plus there’s no hint of any Editor’s Note when u see this google result.
Fairfax ran with the original, of course, but have changed the headline & added the Editor’s Note on some of their pages ONLINE. don’t know what they printed:
Russian hackers penetrated US electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say
(Fairfax) http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au › World
2 days ago
ABC updated…from what, who knows? the whole piece still gives the impression Russia was involved:
the original WaPo “FakeNews” went viral worldwide with Politico upping the ante. this remains their story online:
30 Dec: Politico: Vermont utility confirms system breach by Russians
By Cristiano Lima and Eric Geller
Russian Hackers Penetrated A US Electric Utility In Vermont – BuzzFeed
1 Jan: RT: Facts force Washington Post to backtrack on report that Russia hacked US power grid
The newspaper now says authorities have no such “indications” as people on social media claim the outlet promotes “fake news.” …
Speaking to RT, a former member of the British MI5 intelligence agency, Annie Machon, said that rolling out with a bright headline and later issuing a correction is part of the Washington Post’s tactics.
“Time after time after time, we are seeing this fake news coming out in the Washington Post,” she said. “And every time they put these fake stories out they have to put [out] a disclaimer afterwards. But of course, the seed is then sown,” Machon said. https://www.rt.com/usa/372448-washingtonpost-retracts-russian-hackers/
Google NEWS results for “Washington Post retracts Vermont grid” shows only a group with NY Post, ShoreNewsNetwork, RT and Forbes, and this reduces to RT and Shore when u click on “view all”:
1 Jan: NY Post: Aaron Short: Washington Post retracts story about Russian hack at Vermont utility
“Authorities say there is no indication of that so far [that Russians had penetrated the US electric grid],” according to an editor’s note attached to a corrected version of the story on the paper’s Web site.
“The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid,” the editor’s note read.
News of the supposed hack had set off a firestorm of recriminations, with Vermont leaders calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “a thug” earlier Saturday, after one of the state’s electric utilities found a virus on a laptop computer… http://nypost.com/2017/01/01/washington-post-retracts-story-about-russian-hack-at-vermont-utility/
1 Jan: ShoreNewsNetwork: Phil Stilton: Washington Post Retracts Russian Power Grid Hacking Story
Now, the liberal based newspaper which was under fire for its poor election coverage in 2016 has said no such event took place…
Although Washington has raised allegations of Russian hacking, no solid proof has been provided to the American public to date. Security expert John MacAfee, said this weekend that he is confident the attacks were not originated in Russia. MacAfee said that if Russia was behind the attacks, their tracks would have been well hidden.
He said that a skilled attacker would mask his footprints to make the attacks appear as if they were coming from a third party. He aded, if all of the tracks left lead back to Russia, it was not Russia and a skilled hacker simply made it appear that way… http://www.shorenewsnetwork.com/2017/01/washington-post-retracts-russian-power-grid-hacking-story/
YES, THE DAMAGE HAS NOT ONLY BEEN DONE, IT CONTINUES TO BE DONE, BY THE FAKENEWSMSM. what a disgrace.
Happy New Year Jo and David and to all who frequent this great site.
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And again… Happy New Year Jo and David and all readers.
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an appropriate link, as I wish jo & family & all readers a very happy New Year.
despite being utterly wrong about 2016, BBC feels their top correspondents can provide ***”ESSENTIAL TIPS” about 2017!
the summary doesn’t even mention they virtually all predicted a Hillary win. Paris Agreement is the only CAGW topic they discuss and one of them says Trump won’t walk away from it because that would leave Chinas as LEADER OF THE CAGE WORLD. BBC propaganda is so predictable:
30 Dec: AUDIO: 48mins: BBC Look Ahead: Correspondents Look Ahead
Owen Bennett-Jones is joined by a group of senior BBC journalists to forecast what is likely to happen over the coming year.
***Last time they got together they were firmly predicting that Marco Rubio would become the Republican presidential candidate – and that Britain was likely to vote to stay in the EU. So as the saying goes, making predictions is a tricky business…especially about the future.
Yet our experts can at least lay out the parameters for what is likely to happen in the spheres of geopolitics, economics and society more widely – and give us ***essential tips on what and who to look out for in 2017.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b085z5jp
there’s an attempt to suggest BBC North American correspondent, Jon Sopel, kind of predicted something or other about Trump; however:
AUDIO: 20 Oct: HeatSt: BBC Bias As America Editor Praises ‘Extraordinary’ Hillary Clinton
BBC North America editor Jon Sopel could hardly contain himself when giving his summary of last night’s presidential debate.
Sopel’s colleagues have long suspected that he leans to the left.
And on the strength of his performance on the Today programme this morning they’d be forgiven for doing so:
He lavished praise upon Hillary Clinton so enthusiastically that he almost sounded as though he was a paid advocate of the Democratic Party candidate:
“I think that Hillary Clinton was extraordinarily tactically astute in what she was trying to do which was to say ‘I’m appealing to all Americans, I want to end division.’ She spoke favourably about Ronald Reagan at times. You could almost see the conscious appeal that she was trying to make in sometimes unsubtle ways to get that centrist voter.”
Trump, of course, got the thumbs down from Sopel.
BBC bias? You decide.
http://heatst.com/world/bbc-bias-as-america-editor-praises-extraordinary-hillary-clinton/
19 Nov: ConservativeWoman: Kathy Gyngell: The BBC seems to think it is running for election against Trump
BBC US correspondent Jon Sopel described Trump as a ‘street fighter insurgent’ campaigning ‘with a flame thrower and a flick knife’ – metaphors which questioned the validity of his victory.
But why had the BBC called it wrong? Were they as out of touch as some critics had suggested, Nick Robinson ventured…
Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist, and executive chairman of Breitbart, they immediately cast as a ‘right-wing firebrand’…
On Tuesday, another attack line on Trump allies opened up – with the appointment of a notorious climate change sceptic Myron Ebell to the top environment job on Trump’s transition team. Today (program) was having a field day. Trump’s having ‘knife fights’ with his aides, the BBC’s US correspondent Jon Sopel gleefully told them, literally snorting with derision.
Trump’s team was already in tatters, Today insisted…
Wednesday’s episode found Lady Brooke (aka Sarah Montague) at the helm. Drawing on Bernie Sanders’s support she as good as declared all-out war on Trump…
Mark Steyn’s insight is pertinent here. Once cast as haters, he says, “you de-legitimise their votes. And, if you de-legitimise their votes, you de-legitimise the very idea of representative government”.
This is what they tried this week with Steve Bannon. They failed. But I fear it is just a setback in what will go down as one of the most shameful periods in the BBC’s once proud history.
http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/kathy-gyngell-the-bbc-seems-to-think-it-is-running-for-election-against-trump/
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Just thinking about one of the most memorable New Year Eves I’ve spent. On 31 December 1969 my dad took delivery of a brand new Kingswood station wagon at Elizabeth, a northern suburb of Adelaide and all seven of us did the trip to Baroota, north of Port Pirie, to visit our friends who were former next door neighbours in Mt Gambier. As the oldest of five children I got to sit between mum and dad in the front seat. Seat belts were not compulsory in those days although dad had them installed when we got back to the “Mount”. That was the car in which I learned to drive the next year. The radio was counting down the top 100 songs of the sixties and the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” was number 1, one of their rare hits they did not write.
The year 1969 was arguably the most incredible in history because on July 20/21, depending on which country one lived, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon and Mike Collins orbited above them. Then in November Apollo 12 was also most successful and I delight in telling my sons that Mr Bean walked on the Moon!
Happy New Year to Jo, David and family and all the Mods and to all readers of this fantastic Blog.
Ian
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Ian
1969 was indeed a great year,: it was the year I met my wife just a week before the moon landing and I spent New Years eve in Nuku, a village in New Guinea, just out of Aitape.
No Holden , but some interesting rides in the aircraft then being used.
KK
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Aircraft? New Guinea? I bet they were interesting rides!
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In 1973 I once had the opportunity of being flown into Kerowagi from Kundiawa by a small light aircraft, probably a Cessna, before localisation.
The previous week a light aircraft had crashed flying to this airstrip, one of the once a week total losses that occurred in Papua New Guinea.
Sitting in the front of the aircraft I had a perfect view of the terrain, green and forbidding.
The problem for the last aircraft was 10 10ths cloud cover.
Cloud rolled in obscuring the landing strip.
The chickens in baskets in the back did not seem too concerned.
The pilot was very cheerful pointing to a small gap in the clouds that would be over where he thought the air strip was.
He was right. That’s how I tell the tale.
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I think my flights were Britten Norman Islanders inland but a Fokker I was in going from PM to Wewak had an emergency landing on the east coast due to a nose wheel light issue.
See, I’ve forgotten the name of the place.
That’s what happens when you spend an hour circling over a town to burn up fuel.
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Probably madang but Lae is possible.
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Britten Norman Islander seems to me to be unlikely. Could have been but I do not remember any Islanders in PNG at that time. A twin engined Piaggio seems to me to be more likely.
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There was one referred to as a Helo, it had enormous flaps and seemed almost to hover it was going so slow. Seemed to be inspired by the FiesslerStorch.
Never flew in it but saw it land at, I think, Telefomin.
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Nuku in the West Sepik province is a pretty remote spot, even today.
Would you have been a patrol officer by any chance?
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No Peter, I was visiting a student from Goroka teachers college at the time. We were introduced through The university I was studying at. Spent 3 weeks in the village and a day or so in Port Moresby going in and out.
Nuku, for RW, has a steep sloping airstrip, but plenty of room to turn in front the hill and adjust. The strip compensated for slope by having plenty of length.
30
Happy New Year Jo and David and all who find something worthwhile in this blog.
KK
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2016 was a year of triumph for the “basket of deplorables”. They sent the wannabe masters of the universe to the edges of the nation. The makers at the center said ” NO a Thousand Times NO” to the takers. The takers who pretend to know what is best for everyone else but who produce nothing but more government. Then demand the makers pay for it all.
2017 has a good prospect of having a recovery of the idea that government is servant and the individual is sovereign over his own life. Which means the individual is to be left alone to do, to associate, and to trade voluntarily with others of like mind without force or government mandate. At least now we have a hope of a real future rather than merely hoping that we will have some change left over after the government is done with us.
Happy New Year!
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and the rusted on voters and deluded conservatives. As the political classes start to care about themselves and chase the fringe dwellers, it is wise to consider that people are very frustrated by politicians who say one thing and do another, who conspire to make sure the people you want are not the leaders, from Hilary’s hatchet job on Sanders, Corbyn’s elimination of rivals and Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten’s replay of the assassination of Julius Ceasar. The democratic world is hungry for people who want to represent the people, not look after their own fame and fortune. People who do not need the money. It was appalling that the Clinton’s excuse for their money train was that they left the White House broke? Not a bad free holiday house with a free helicopter service. In Victoria we saw a minister sending his puppies around the state by government chauffeur and a speaker of Federal parliament on $400K pa using a helicopter for party business.
It is the overwhelming idea that the voters exist for the politicians which rankles. As Abbott says, Climate Science is crap. No who else in Australian politics is prepared to say that? Can we have our PM back this year?
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A happy new year to Jo, David and all the readers of this blog. A special thanks for the mental health support over the years prior to 2016 when it felt that I was the only one who saw that the emperor had no clothes. But although practicalities required that most of the conversation here was scientific it was lovely to know I wasn’t the only one with right wing ideas – interestingly when I do questionnaires about where I am on the political spectrum Aussies and New Zealand ones have me being quite extreme right wing but the US ones I’ve done have me as centrist – right in the middle! Its also been lovely to have some political comment these last months.
So all the best to everyone here. And may the move away from the Marxist leftie ideology continue in the west and occur strongly here in Australia. Hopefully we will get some decent Liberal leadership along the way.
And despite the media trumpeting that this year was once again the hottest EVA, this is the coolest most comfortable summer I’ve had in Perth since I arrived in 2000.
40
Happy new year and best wishes to Jo and David, and to all those who make this site a ‘must-see’ destination for anyone who appreciate genuine science and engineering endeavours.
2016 was not my best year by a long shot, so I am looking at 2017 with optimism and anticipation, though may not be saying that once the hangover kicks in!.
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A memorable year ahead, with the Trump Effect and global cooling, all the best everyone.
80
Global Cooling? Don’t forget the volcanoes:
Peru volcanoes explode into life triggering state of emergency and MASS EVACUATION
Worryingly, Peru is suffering from two active volcanoes at the same time, the first time this has occurred in recorded history.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/747986/Peru-volcanoes-Sabancaya-Ubinas-state-of-emergency-evacuation
. . .
Happy New Year to the green & red thumbs @jonova.
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In 2017 may we all find the wisdom to know when we are mistaken, the courage to try new directions, and the perseverance to work until we succeed.
In Sol we trust.
In the name of the sun, the satellite, and Joe Pesci,
Ra-men.
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Alarmists have reason to fear,
That their cause could well plummet next year,
Like Berlin’s pulled down wall,
Or Humpty’s great fall,
Giving skeptics good reason to cheer.
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A HAPPY NEW YEAR to Jo and the gang and to all the visitors on this site.
70
Happy New Year from the UK. It should be a good year.
50
And to you Phillip. After all the time and effort you have put into fighting the Green Blob it must be wonderful seeing it coming to the end.
Some one posted elsewhere about the collapse of the (previously dominant) Phlogiston theory in the eighteenth century, and now we get to see another eighteenth century theory collapse. I hope you keep well and can really enjoy the end of this fr**d.
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Happy New Year everyone!
My goal this year is to start a job agency that specializes in the needs of unemployed climate “scientists.” My crystal ball says it will be a booming market.
Besides, I love the challenge of finding work for those that probably have never put in an honest day’s labor their entire lives.
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Happy new year to all.
Perhaps you could expand the agency to include those employed building solar and wind farms, mainly honest folk working for snake oil salesmen spruiking their wares in high places.
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Happy New Year to both you and David Jo, but most important of all, continued good health!
90
Brief recap: 2016 brought us Brexit and a Trump victory. 2017 will bring us a Trump Presidency and with luck a Merkel defeat.
Let the good times roll; and Happy New Year to all.
90
May 2017 bring an end to 72 years (1945-2017) of misuse of nuclear physics to frighten the public and hide from the public our remarkably good fortune at living on a water-covered planet exactly 1 AU (astronomical unit) from the pulsar that birthed the world five billion years (5 Ga) ago, . . .
as the late Professor Paul Kazuo Kuroda (1917 – 2001), realized while standing in the ruins of Hiroshima in Aug 1945:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/TRIBUTE_TO_KURODA.pdf
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Happy and prosperous New Year to Jo and David, and all that visit this blog.
60
Happy New Year to all.
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To everyone who lurks this blog a Happy new year, may 2017 be another victory for freedom and defeat of tyranny.
110
I would like to second that except that our resident trolls won’t find the new year at all enjoyable. Still they have always preached gloom and doom, so happy gall and wormword for Frank, David Appell, Twinotter, Julian and Tristian.
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raYes may this be a happy and prosperous new year for Jo David and all the polite sceptical commenters who frequent this site. May the gang of five (as defined by Graeme No.3) curse thye winter chills , and may the new year see the return of the Griss.
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Jo
New Year present
” Sandy In Limousin
December 31, 2016 at 11:07 am
I think “Green Energy” is undermining German support for Green Energy. Check out renewable performance here
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm
Looking by month is particularly enlightening”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/31/mother-jones-trump-effect-undermining-support-for-german-green-energy/#comment-2386258
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Sorry about the typos. New Years resolution, “eliminate typos”.
30
HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone , friend or foe , although we sceptics don’t have real enemies do we , anyway here is George Thorogood with some of the greatest names in rocking blues , hohttps://youtu.be/129Ek_aAaLsw many can you name ; enjoy
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I will try again ;https://youtu.be/kODhvOvO2EQ
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Dave Barry’s review of 2016
http://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article123321019.html
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Happy New Year to everyone.
I go though news sites to get here and as always there is some rubbish news pushing the regressive progressives, the only people who care. This morning it is about how the Russians have malware on US power distributor computers. Really? Of course this only happened after Hilary lost the election. Only since the election have the Russians had spies in the US, not China. The US of course has no spies in Russia or agents around the world.
Also nothing to do with the ceasefire in Syria where the Turks and Russians have brought peace to the country by not involving the people trying to oust Assad, openly the US and Saudis. Now who is the aggressor again? It’s not as if the Turks and Russians are great friends with a Russian jet shot down and the Russian ambassador shot last week but having een the fall of Hussain, Gadaffi, Mubarek and more, the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East is the funding and arming of rebel groups led by people like Osama Bin Laden. All in the name of freedom. What sort of freedom is there in these countries? Tunisia for example? Who withdrew US troops from Iraq? Who enabled the establishment of a new Middle East Caliphate from Kabul to Tunisia? History will not deal kindly with Obama and his friends.
Now he has three weeks to bring down the Russias. As Trump says, Putin is not taking the bait and leaving Obama look like the lame duck he is.
Obama’s other great bandwagon is Climate Change. What can the Democrats do by Presidential decree between now and January 20th, short of declaring war on someone?
What can Obama do that Trump cannot easily undo? The world can only be thankful Putin is not taking the bait. It is thinkable that Obama is trying to create a crisis which means he stays in power.
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Eight years in power. Only three weeks to wreck the joint. What more can Obama do?
30
In this Observer article 2 days ago Maria Zakharova, an official representative of the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs says,
“They are once again trying to frighten us with the widening of anti-Russian sanctions, with measures of ‘diplomatic nature,’ and even with the sabotage of our computer systems…Frankly, we are sick and tired of the outright lies about ‘Russian hackers’ that continue to pour down in the United States from the very top. The Obama Administration launched this disinformation half a year ago in an attempt to support the position of their desired candidate for the November Presidential elections. Having not achieved their desired outcome, now they are looking for the justification of their failure and, doubling their efforts, they are taking revenge on the Russian-American relations.”
and Dmitry Kiselyov from the same article,
“Now, with all of his might, Obama tries to spoil everything everywhere for the President-elect Trump. And with every day, his behavior gets worse and worse. It seems that on the eve of the inauguration—January, 20—he will have nothing else left to do for himself but to break all the windows in the White House and to leave behind a pile [of s**t] on the steps.”
I think Trump and being incredibly annoying in the years after 20/01/2017 will be Obama’s legacies.
30
And a very Happy New Year to you too Jo. And may it bring interesting developments!
Ken
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Happy New Year to those folks down under!!!
40
And the same to all you people up over!!!
30
Happy New Year to all.
I am finding things a little slow around the blog sites that I visit with many on holidays so I went to http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/ one of the many links on the JoNova website and checked the http://sppiblog.org/ and found some articles that may be of interest to followers of JoNova http://sppiblog.org/news/response-for-letter-to-trump and http://sppiblog.org/news/another-climate-alarmist-admits-real-motive-behind-warming-scare are some of the articles.
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Happy New Year to all.
And may we hold all the trump cards. ! 🙂
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Amen to that.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/trump_shadow_scr.jpg
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2016 soon to be declared the hottest year ever recorded.
Bitter cold and record snow across northern continents will be declared part of global warming due to unusual polar vortex all NOW predicted by coupled GCMs. AND the albedo feedback affect of snow will be declared as being previously overstated in the models. It is getting tougher to spin the virtues of climate models.
It appears that 2017 could be the year CO2 gets a reprieve from its status as a pollutant.
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The El Nino held sway for most of the year in the NH.
The “hottest year” mantra relies totally on the El Nino transient.
2017 will not have an El Nino… 😉
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Happy New year all.
My Physical Model of the Global Climate System
Take a bath tub. Use one of those really nice big ones with the big feet and about twice the capacity of the new fancy ones- this is your atmosphere. Turn on the water and get it running nice and warm with lots of volume – this is your CO2 natural source. Open the drain. This is your natural CO2 sink. Adjust the source to about match the sink. Put two 2 year old children into the tub to simulate the coupled chaotic activity (one could be planetary orbital eccentricity and the other cosmic rays). Give one of the kids a wire strainer and demonstrate the drag you can feel when it is placed over drain. This is natural variability of the sink. Show the other one the neat noise changes you can make by twisting the faucet handles (the old tubs all had two). This is the natural variability in the source. Now get a squirt gun and start using it to fill the tub. This is CO2 from fossil fuel combustion. Measure the average depth of the water every half hour. To be scientific make sure both kids are sitting down when you measure. If the depth is increasing over time you can claim that the squirt gun has caused it all and pretty soon the tub will overflow if we don’t stop with the squirting. Or you could question that claim and think the imbalance of the source and sink that was effected by trading places
because it was “MY TURN” had more to do with it. Who wants to bet the tub will fill and spill before it drains dry?
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Happy new year to most here! Have not commented much of late, have read this blog daily though.
Any predictions?
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‘Any predictions?’
A psychological paradigm shift.
“Here’s to hoping the Age of Trump will herald the demise of climate change dogma, and acceptance of a broader range of perspectives in climate science and our policy options,” said Georgia Tech scientist Judith Curry.
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Happy New Year to Jo, David and the “wains”. Thank you for a great year on this site. This year should be a bobby dazzler. And, David, I hope you get your papers published at last.
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New Year’s Resolution for FakeNewsMSM – stop it now:
31 Dec: TheIntercept: Glenn Greenwald: Russia Hysteria Infects WashPost Again: False Story About Hacking U.S. Electric Grid
The first sentence of the article directly linked this cyberattack to alleged Russian hacking of the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta — what is now routinely referred to as “Russian hacking of our election” — by referencing the code name revealed on Wednesday by the Obama administration when it announced sanctions on Russian officials: “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials.”…
The media reactions, as Alex Pfeiffer documents, were exactly what one would expect: hysterical, alarmist proclamations of Putin’s menacing evil…
The Post’s story also predictably and very rapidly infected other large media outlets. Reuters thus told its readers around the world: “A malware code associated with Russian hackers has reportedly been detected within the system of a Vermont electric utility.”…
What’s the problem here? It did not happen.
There was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid.” The truth was undramatic and banal…
As the actual truth emerged once the utility company issued its statement, the Post ***rushed to fix its embarrassment, beginning by dramatically changing its headline…
The headline is still absurd…READ ON
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/31/russia-hysteria-infects-washpost-again-false-story-about-hacking-u-s-electric-grid/
29 Dec: The Intercept: Glenn Greenwald: The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False
(updated below [Fri.])
The shoddy and misleading Guardian article, written by Ben Jacobs, was published on December 24. It made two primary claims — both of which are demonstrably false. The first false claim was hyped in the article’s headline: “Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview.” This claim was repeated in the first paragraph of the article: “Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has offered guarded praise of Donald Trump. …”…
Those claims are made up.
Despite how much online attention it received, Jacobs’s Guardian article contained no original reporting. Indeed, it did nothing but purport to summarize the work of an actually diligent journalist: Stefania Maurizi of the Italian daily la Repubblica, who traveled to London and conducted the interview with Assange. Maurizi’s interview was conducted in English, and la Repubblica published the transcript online. Jacobs’s “work” consisted of nothing other than purporting to re-write the parts of that interview he wanted to highlight, so that he and The Guardian could receive the traffic for her work…
Ever since the Guardian article was published and went viral, Maurizi has repeatedly objected to the false claims being made about what Assange said in their interview. But while Western journalists keep re-tweeting and sharing The Guardian’s second-hand summary of this interview, they completely ignore Maurizi’s protests — for reasons that are both noxious and revealing…
But, like so much online fake news, this was a fraud that had a huge impact, as The Guardian and Jacobs surely knew would happen…
***UPDATE [Fri.]: The Guardian, to its credit, has now retracted one of the baseless claims in Jacobs’ article, and corrected and amended several others…
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of-julian-assanges-interview-went-viral-and-was-completely-false/
***TOO LATE, GLENN.
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related comment has gone into moderation.
shock horror:
31 Dec: ABC America: Trump Ditches Media for Golf Game by Jill Colvin, Associated Press
President-elect Donald Trump has ditched his press pool once again — this time traveling to play golf at his club in Jupiter, Florida, without a pool of journalists on hand ***to ensure the public has knowledge of his whereabouts…
A club member posted a photo on Twitter of Trump on the greens Saturday morning…
Trump, both as a candidate and during the transition, has often scoffed at tradition, such as allowing a group of reporters to follow him at all times, to ensure the public knows where he is. Not long after his election, Trump went out to dinner with his family in Manhattan without informing the pool of his whereabouts.
The practice is meant to ensure that journalists are on hand to witness, on behalf of the public, the activities of the president or president-elect, rather than relying on secondhand accounts.
The White House also depends on having journalists nearby at all times to relay the president’s first comments on breaking news…
being eagerly picked up worldwide, of course:
Donald Trump ditches press pool for golf game
The Australian-53 minutes ago
8 Dec: InvestorsBusinessDaily Editorial: Trump Owes The Media Nothing — Here’s Why
“His coverage was negative from the start and never came close to entering positive territory,” said Thomas E. Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard…
But the fact is, Democrats aside, even some in the media noticed how bad it was.
As The Hill’s Joe Concha noted on Oct. 17: “The broadcast evening news programs on ABC, NBC and CBS covered allegations against Trump by several women who claim he sexually assaulted them for more than 23 minutes combined on Thursday night.”
But, he went on, “revelations in the WikiLeaks email dump of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — which included derogatory comments by senior campaign officials about Catholics, Latinos and the NAACP, sympathy for Wall Street, advocation for open borders and blatant examples of media collusion with said campaign — got a whole 1 minute and 7 seconds combined.
“Ratio of negative coverage of Trump vs. Clinton: 23:1.
“In print on Thursday, it was no better. The New York Times — known as the paper of record — had 11 negative stories on Trump, including one in the sports section. But zero on Clinton/WikiLeaks.
“Ratio: 11:0.”
Yes, it was that one-sided.
But, ironically, it seems to have worked in Trump’s favor…
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/trump-owes-the-media-nothing-heres-why/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PoliticRss+%28Politic+RSS%29
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“The broadcast evening news programs on ABC, NBC and CBS covered allegations against Trump by several women who claim he sexually assaulted them for more than 23 minutes combined on Thursday night.”
Either Trump is a hell of a stud, or that is shocking sentence construction. I despair of modern journalists, their command of the English language, especially syntax, is abysmal.
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“several women who claim he sexually assaulted them for more than 23 minutes combined “
This Trump guy must be pretty close to Superman.
Seems not one of them complained at the time. ! 😉
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Typographical error – they put Trump instead of hump (as in camel).
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and we haven’t heard a peep out of them since the election.
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Happy New Year to Jo, David, and all my fellow skeptics who live down under. You Aussies are the best!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfR9iY5y94s
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Personally, I’m glad to be quit of 2016. The reasons are both personal and plain old political. Let us work together to make the world a better place in 2017.
Jo and David, without knowing what he future will hold in store I’m still willing to predict that you two will have been big contributors to that better 2017.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, ONE AND ALL!
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I didn’t have a good year either Roy and it was the big one you don’t want to go through.
Currently in Vietnam for a bit over a week.
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Having problems understanding GCM’s.
Do the latest models actually work?
Do we wait 20 years to find out?
Or are we doomed to have them re tuned to fit the past?
Has the CSIRO published a model for Australian climatic zones that works and we can test?
We have already found that the one predicting the ‘dams will dry’ has not eventuated.
Can anyone give me a link that shows the method of homogenisation that used the average temperature of a number of sites, including Rutherglen and Hillston to be a useful climatic representation of the real climate states of South Eastern Australia?
As always the best to all readers and contributors on this site.
May you live long and prosper.
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The CSIRO Climate Science Centre needs more funds:
“Reliable decadal climate forecasts would enable decision-makers in agriculture, energy, water, health, financial, insurance and other sectors to manage the risks and opportunities arising from decadal variations in climate. Effective adaptation requires regional information on climate variability and change, and changes in extreme events like floods and droughts, on decadal time-scales. But anticipating the climate of the coming decades is a difficult scientific challenge, in part because both natural climate variability and anthropogenic climate change influence climate on these timescales. A team of 15 researchers at the Centre will develop and test a prototype decadal forecasting system, a first for Australia”.
‘Scientists at The Collaboration for Australian Weather and Climate Research, a partnership between CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, have developed Australia’s next generation climate model: the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS).”
“One of the major achievements of ACCESS is the improvement of weather forecasts. It is now possible to forecast the weather three days ahead with the same level of accuracy as for two-day forecasts previously. This makes for greater certainty in planning and responding to weather events.”
WOW!! With a massive super computer they can now forecast three days ahead. But they can publish unvalidated claims of their simulations for the next 100 years. Pull the other one.
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Lewis
FYI
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/a-remarkably-tiny-global-circulation-model-you-can-run/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/12/28/inside-gcm-model-ii/
And an earlier Chiefio effort in here
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp/
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Thanks for this.
Well above my pay scale.
When I ever retire it will make interesting work.
The problem that emerged for us Aussies was that the GCMS that we were contributing, to got Australian Continental Climate change wrong.
When Al Gore said the North would dry, it got wetter.
When Prof Flannery said our dams would dry, it rained more and the dams filled.
When we asked politely for the method and code to work out homogenisation,particularly the Hillston/Rutherglen one, that conflates two climate zones, it is not clearly available.
I was given a link to it on Watts Up With That, but it does not work.
Hence my try here.
lets call it a New Year’s aspiration.
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Happy new current year, Jo!
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Hoppy new year, all.
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Thanks, Skippy ! 🙂
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***lesson of the year:
30 Dec: ConservativeTreehouse: sundance: 2016 Will Be Remembered as The Year “Media Polling” Corruption Was Exposed…
With election 2016 behind us, and before 2017 arrives, the truth behind the intentionally constructed deception must not simply fade back into the shadows.
***Never again should the American voter trust the polling presented by corporate media. Everything about it is a financed and manufactured fraud…
THE MEDIA POLLSTERS DIDN’T GET IT WRONG …
…THEY LIED.
The professional media polling agents knew exactly what the truth was…
***The same analytical tools available to us, and to those who were ridiculed for truth-telling, were available to them and many more. They did not get it wrong; they didn’t make mistakes. They chose to lie to the American electorate.
So lets name the most notorious liars so their names and organizations can forever be dispatched from the land where credibility is of value:…READ ON
COMMENT: CountryClassVulgarian: Bill Mitchell also did some great analysis into the fraud built in the polls.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/12/30/2016-will-be-remembered-as-the-year-media-polling-corruption-was-exposed/
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Same fake polls that were used to knife Abbott.
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https://imgflip.com/i/1gwj17
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Wishing you and your family a Happy and Prosperous New Year for 2017.
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Happy New Year to everyone and thanks JoanneNova for maintaining a science blog of the utmost integrity. It is always a pleasure to visit each day.
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jo has a new thread, but this final FakeNews piece needs to go here.
FakeNewsNYT, the biggest pusher of the FakeNews meme, has no ethical concerns about employing the Podesta Emails-compromised Glenn Thrush, even tho they’re laying off staff, & FakeNewsWaPo Wemple is happy to report the following garbage, without recognising the irony:
12 Dec: WaPo: ***ERIK WEMPLE BLOG: Glenn Thrush on leaving Politico for the NYT: ‘You can’t be an eighth-year senior in high school’
Glenn Thrush, a veteran political reporter who has been with Politico since 2008, is leaving for the New York Times, as reported by Michael Calderone of the Huffington Post. In doing so, Thrush is sliding down a well-greased exit chute: New York Times standbys Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns have all made the same move in recent years…
In addition to serving as Politico’s chief political correspondent, he has been a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine. That latter function has allowed Thrush to assist in Politico’s turn toward slow-cooking feature stories with greater long-term resonance than the site’s early fare.
***A memorable long-form collaboration with Haberman in spring 2014 asked, “What Is Hillary Clinton Afraid Of?” Answer: The media — and the double-bylined piece foretold the Clinton campaign’s tortured relationship with news organizations in the 2016 campaign…
And along with Alex Isenstadt, he wrote about ***turmoil within the Trump campaign following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape…
“And there are growing signs that the GOP nominee is no longer competing just against Hillary Clinton, but against members of his own party who are withdrawing or reconsidering their reluctant endorsements, making Trump’s objective on Sunday less about reviving his candidacy than proving himself able to stop his party from completely abandoning him to the electoral wolves howling outside Trump Tower,” read the story …
The White House beat in the coming years will be a hothouse for reportorial inquiry…
In his Politico incarnation, Thrush used Twitter to throw some pointed short-form elbows at the incoming White House crew. Examples:…READ
Such tartness may not be bursting from Thrush’s account in the coming months…
Emailing habits may also undergo curtailment. As part of the WikiLeaks dump of emails pertaining to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, Thrush was put face to face with an email he’d sent to Podesta. He was seeking to check his reporting: “Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f****d up anything,” wrote Thrush…
Thrush joins a New York Times that is losing staff. Around 70 New York Times employees have taken buyouts, and layoffs are next. “It really is an incredibly painful situation,” says Thrush…
Addressing his work at the Times, Thrush says the newspaper will need to counter the “misstatements of fact” that come from President-elect Trump, though he credited the paper for already excelling on that front. “They view that increasingly as one of their responsibilities,” says Thrush…
(A MERE FIVE COMMENTS, ALL SCATHING OR MOCKING – was the blog post hidden away?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/12/12/glenn-thrush-on-leaving-politico-for-the-nyt-you-cant-be-an-eighth-year-senior-in-high-school/?utm_term=.73d7bc02909a
Wemple is quite the FakeNews character himself – check under “Career”:
Wikipedia: Erik Wemple
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Wemple
some more accurate headlines Wemple could have used:
ZeroHedge: New York Times Hires Politico’s Self-Described “Hack” Who Sent Stories To Clinton For Approval
NY Times Hires Reporter Who Called Himself A ‘Hack’ | The Daily Caller (WORTH FINDING ONLINE AND READING)
NY Times hires ‘hack’ – Student News Daily
Breitbart: New York Times Hires Glenn Thrush After Wikileaks Humiliation
The New York Times also had its share of embarrassments from Wikileaks’ “Podesta Emails”:
• The paper provided interview questions to Bill Clinton before a live Q&A with columnist Nicholas Kristof.
• The campaign dictated what Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for the Times‘ magazine, could and could not print from an interview with Secretary Clinton.
• Clinton staffers said that political reporter Amy Chozick privately praised Hillary, “may as well have been sitting in her lap” at a private awards ceremony, and alerted the campaign that she was working on a story that could undermine a colleague’s investigative report based on the book Clinton Cash — authored by Peter Schweizer, a Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News…
Five minutes after announcing his move to the Times, Thrush sent a shoutout to a “friend” and veteran of the Clinton campaign…ETC
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/12/12/new-york-times-hires-glenn-thrush-wikileaks-humiliation/
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Wemple, is this “the Clinton campaign’s tortured relationship with news organizations in the 2016 campaign” u and FakeNews hack Haberman wrote about?
10 Oct: The Intercept: EXCLUSIVE: New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship
by Glenn Greenwald & Lee Fang
Internal strategy documents and emails among Clinton staffers shed light on friendly and highly useful relationships between the campaign and various members of the U.S. media, as well as the campaign’s strategies for manipulating those relationships.
The emails were provided to The Intercept by the source identifying himself as Guccifer 2.0, who was reportedly responsible for prior significant hacks, including one that targeted the Democratic National Committee and resulted in the resignations of its top four officials. On Friday, Obama administration officials claimed that Russia’s “senior-most officials” were responsible for that hack and others, although they provided no evidence for that assertion…
One January 2015 strategy document — designed to plant stories on Clinton’s decision-making process about whether to run for president — singled out reporter ***Maggie Haberman, then of Politico, now covering the election for the New York Times, as a “friendly journalist” who has “teed up” stories for them in the past and “never disappointed” them…
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak-reveals-clinton-campaigns-cozy-press-relationship/
10 Oct: DailyWire: John Nolte: WikiLeaks Outs NYT Maggie Haberman as Clinton Operative
Maggie Haberman is one of the most dishonest journalists I have ever come across. Going back five years to when she was still with Politico, I have repeatedly exposed her lies and fraud. She is currently with the New York Times, and thanks to WikiLeaks, we now have incontrovertible proof that Haberman is nothing more than a spin doctor for Hillary Clinton and her campaign…
the most ironic part of the whole Russia helped Trump win the election fantasy by giving WikiLeaks the Podesta/DNC emails or whatever is the FakeNewsMSM wouldn’t even report on the emails, if u recall.
FakeNewsMSM would only ask who leaked them and say they might not be accurate. remember the idiot Cuomo on CNN telling his viewers they were not allowed to read them; that it was CNN’s job and then they would tell their viewers what was in them. lol.
death to the MSM in 2017.
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Happy New Year to you, Ms Nova, and to Mr Evans, and I wish you both great success in the coming year, with more to follow.
Also, a Happy New Year to all the other “deplorables” who may lurk here, and even those who can only snipe – for whom it should be told, while the UK may be leaving the EU, you will still be able to get your regular fix of Nandos, so don’t get too upset (perhaps an obscure joke, especially to you in the extreme southern counties of England – check it out on Youtube).
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The Happiest of New Years to you all from this “deplorable”. It is looking like it’s going to be one to remember! The countdown till when the real fun begins is:
https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/generic?year=2017&month=Jan&day=20&hour=12P&min=00&sec=00&p0=913&fg2=fff&msg=Inauguration+Day&csz=1
I live 468 air miles WNW of Washington DC and upwind relative to the prevailing winds, but I think I still get a whiff of the smell of electrical motors overheating. I suspect that it’s paper shredders working overtime in DC. As Gail so aptly put it. It will be nice to not have to be forced to examine Obama’s nose hairs on a weekly basis.
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A fantastic new year to one and all! The lefties don’t have a clue as to what is happening. Whenever when they try explaining it they usually fall very short and misread the situation. However I have a lot of faith in what will actually be achieved. So let’s look forward to a fantastic new year.
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Jill Stein, the Greens candidate in the recent US election, blames the new years day terrorist attack in Istanbul on climate change: https://twitter.com/DrStillJein/status/815394519332093952
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Haha, nice trolling there, Rod. Fooled me for a few seconds.
Still it says something, doesn’t it, when it is hard to tell the difference between a genuine Greens talking point and a parody twitter account like that one.
You did know it was a parody account and not the real Jill Stein before passing it on to us, right? 😉
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update, read all:
1 Jan: Forbes: Kalev Leetaru: “Fake News” And how the Washington Post rewrote its story on Russian hacking of the power grid
On Friday the Washington Post sparked a wave of fear when it ran the breathless headline “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.” …
Yet, it turns out this narrative was false and as the chronology below will show, illustrates how effectively false and misleading news can ricochet through the global news echo chamber through the pages of top tier newspapers that fail to properly verify their facts…
The original article was posted online on the Washington Post’s website at 7:55PM EST. Somewhere between 9:24PM and 10:06PM the Post updated the article to indicate that multiple computer systems at the utility had been breached (“computers” plural), but that further data was still being collected…
Several paragraphs of additional material were added between 8PM and 10PM, claiming and contextualizing the breach as part of a broader campaign of Russian hacking against the US, including the DNC and Podesta email breaches…
Despite the article ballooning from 8 to 18 paragraphs, the publication date of the article remained unchanged and no editorial note was appended, meaning that a reader being forwarded a link to the article would have no way of knowing the article they were seeing was in any way changed from the original version published 2 hours prior…
The following morning, nearly 11 hours after changing the headline and rewriting the article to indicate that the grid itself was never breached and the “hack” was only an isolated laptop with malware, the Post still had not appended any kind of editorial note to indicate that it had significantly changed the focus of the article.
This is significant, as one driving force of fake news is that as much of 60% of the links shared on social media are shared based on the title alone, with the sharer not actually reading the article itself. Thus, the title assigned to an article becomes the story itself and the Post’s incorrect title meant that the story that spread virally through the national echo chamber was that the Russians had hacked into the US power grid…
Only after numerous outlets called out the Post’s changes did the newspaper finally append an editorial note ***at the very bottom of the article more than half a day later…
Yet, even this correction is not a true reflection of public facts as known. The utility indicated only that a laptop was found to contain malware that has previously been associated with Russian hackers. As many pointed out, the malware in question is actually available for purchase online, meaning anyone could have used it and its mere presence is not a guarantee of Russian government involvement. Moreover, a malware infection can come from many sources, including visiting malicious websites…
When I reached out to Kris Coratti, Vice President of Communications and Events for the Washington Post for comment, she responded that regarding the headline change, “Headlines aren’t written by story authors. When editors realized it overreached, as happens from time to time with headlines, it was corrected.” She also indicated that posting the editor’s note at the bottom of the article instead of the top was a mistake and indeed ***this was corrected shortly after my email to her inquiring about it…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/#36a22e3b291e
***yes, the Editor’s Note now appears at the top of the article ONLINE, but this story was on the front page of WaPo print version 30 Dec, cont’d on page A4.
below does show the “absurd” new headline, as Greenwald called it – see comment #32, but the even worse original headline could have gone out on early editions for all I know:
WaPo Front Page 30 Dec: Russian operation hacks Vt. utility
continues on Page A4
(naturally no Editor’s Note)
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post
more to come.
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Glenn Greenwald: Update on link comment #32 above: UPDATE: Just as The Guardian had to do just two days ago regarding its claim about WikiLeaks and Putin, the Washington Post has now added an editor’s note to its story acknowledging that its key claim was false:
“Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that ***so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid.”
Is it not very clear that journalistic standards are being casually dispensed with when the subject is Russia?
original WaPo headline: Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say.
was changed online to:
Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to US electrical grid security, officials say
Washington Post-30 Dec. 2016
big deal! plus there’s no hint of any Editor’s Note when u see this google result.
Fairfax ran with the original, of course, but have changed the headline & added the Editor’s Note on some of their pages ONLINE. don’t know what they printed:
Russian hackers penetrated US electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say
(Fairfax) http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au › World
2 days ago
ABC updated…from what, who knows? the whole piece still gives the impression Russia was involved:
ABC: updated 31 Dec: Russian hacking malware found on Vermont energy company computer
The statement came after a Washington Post report that Russian hackers had penetrated a Vermont utility…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-31/russian-hacking-malware-found-on-vermont-energy-company-computer/8155734
the original WaPo “FakeNews” went viral worldwide with Politico upping the ante. this remains their story online:
30 Dec: Politico: Vermont utility confirms system breach by Russians
By Cristiano Lima and Eric Geller
Russian Hackers Penetrated A US Electric Utility In Vermont – BuzzFeed
1 Jan: RT: Facts force Washington Post to backtrack on report that Russia hacked US power grid
The newspaper now says authorities have no such “indications” as people on social media claim the outlet promotes “fake news.” …
Speaking to RT, a former member of the British MI5 intelligence agency, Annie Machon, said that rolling out with a bright headline and later issuing a correction is part of the Washington Post’s tactics.
“Time after time after time, we are seeing this fake news coming out in the Washington Post,” she said. “And every time they put these fake stories out they have to put [out] a disclaimer afterwards. But of course, the seed is then sown,” Machon said.
https://www.rt.com/usa/372448-washingtonpost-retracts-russian-hackers/
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Google NEWS results for “Washington Post retracts Vermont grid” shows only a group with NY Post, ShoreNewsNetwork, RT and Forbes, and this reduces to RT and Shore when u click on “view all”:
1 Jan: NY Post: Aaron Short: Washington Post retracts story about Russian hack at Vermont utility
“Authorities say there is no indication of that so far [that Russians had penetrated the US electric grid],” according to an editor’s note attached to a corrected version of the story on the paper’s Web site.
“The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid,” the editor’s note read.
News of the supposed hack had set off a firestorm of recriminations, with Vermont leaders calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “a thug” earlier Saturday, after one of the state’s electric utilities found a virus on a laptop computer…
http://nypost.com/2017/01/01/washington-post-retracts-story-about-russian-hack-at-vermont-utility/
1 Jan: ShoreNewsNetwork: Phil Stilton: Washington Post Retracts Russian Power Grid Hacking Story
Now, the liberal based newspaper which was under fire for its poor election coverage in 2016 has said no such event took place…
Although Washington has raised allegations of Russian hacking, no solid proof has been provided to the American public to date. Security expert John MacAfee, said this weekend that he is confident the attacks were not originated in Russia. MacAfee said that if Russia was behind the attacks, their tracks would have been well hidden.
He said that a skilled attacker would mask his footprints to make the attacks appear as if they were coming from a third party. He aded, if all of the tracks left lead back to Russia, it was not Russia and a skilled hacker simply made it appear that way…
http://www.shorenewsnetwork.com/2017/01/washington-post-retracts-russian-power-grid-hacking-story/
YES, THE DAMAGE HAS NOT ONLY BEEN DONE, IT CONTINUES TO BE DONE, BY THE FAKENEWSMSM. what a disgrace.
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A belated happy Christmas and new year Jo, family, mods and all the visitors to this wonderful site.
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