Headlines Wednesday 30th July

Still waiting for Vietnam
Andrew Bolt
What you no doubt missed in the latest TV news report on Iraq:

July marked the lowest US soldier death toll since the start of the war, according to a USA Today tally.
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Far from model predictions. As for the CSIRO’s…
Andrew Bolt
Steve McIntyre notes a new paper which tests 18 years of predictions by global warming models against real-world rainfall and temperature. Result? The models are hopeless at predicting anything. From the abstract (Koutsoyiannis et al):

Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.
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The Jeremiah Wright of the SMH
Andrew Bolt
In the US, Barack Obama’s preacher, Jeremiah Wright, says white authorities deliberately introduced AIDS to blacks:

The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.
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No new constitution would have helped stop this
Andrew Bolt
What Kevin Rudd saw in Yirrkala last week gave him a dream involving more pieces of paper:

KEVIN Rudd today declared it was time to recognise the rights of indigenous people in Australia’s Constitution. In Arnhem Land for a historic cabinet meeting, Mr Rudd said the Government would “give attention to detailed, sensitive consultation with indigenous communities about the most appropriate form and timing of constitutional recognition”.
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Coffee is too social a drink for Starbucks
Andrew Bolt
Victims of a cultural illiteracy:

ALMOST 700 employees of the coffee chain Starbucks will lose their jobs on Sunday after the company yesterday announced the closure of 61 of its 84 Australian stores… The president of Starbucks Asia Pacific, John Culver, admitted: “I think what we’ve seen is that Australia has a very sophisticated coffee culture.”
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If Coates can’t get through, pity the spectators
Andrew Bolt
Not a promising start:

AUSTRALIAN Olympic Committee members John Coates ... had to spend his first night in Beijing at an IOC-assigned hotel instead of the athletes’ village, where he is the Australian chef de mission, because he could not get his accreditation validated at Beijing airport.
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Blame not Nelson but his colleagues
Andrew Bolt
Lenore Taylor is largely right - this is a mess:

BRENDAN Nelson has stepped back from a confrontation with leadership rival Malcolm Turnbull, failing to make good his promise to toughen the Coalition’s position on climate change and leaving open the chance of Senate negotiations over the Government’s emissions trading legislation…
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It’s George W. Batman
Andrew Bolt
FINALLY Hollywood makes a film that says President George W Bush was right.

But director Christopher Nolan had to disguise it a little, so journalists wouldn’t freak and the film’s more fashionable stars wouldn’t walk.

So he hides Bush in a cape. He even sticks a mask on him, with pointy ears for some reason.

Sure, when the terrified citizens of Gotham City scream for Bush to come save them, Nolan has them shine a great W in the night sky, but he blurs it so it looks more like a bird.

Or a bat, perhaps.

And he has them call their hero not Mr Bush, of course, or even “Mr President”, but . . . Batman.

And what do you know? Bush may be one of the most despised presidents in American history, but this movie of his struggle is now smashing all box-office records.

Critics weep, audiences swoon - and suddenly the world sees Bush’s agonising dilemma and sympathises with what it had been taught so long to despise.
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Earth cools, but professor overheats
Andrew Bolt
THERE was one bizarre flaw in Professor Barry Brook’s column on this page on Monday.

He sent us his salvo to prove I was wrong last week when I showed you seven graphs and said they proved the world wasn’t warming as global warming preachers had promised.

I was wrong, that is, to say that the world hadn’t warmed since 1998 and had slowly cooled since 2002, or maybe wrong to say it might matter.

And I was wrong to say the seas had fallen for two years, sea ice had grown, and the weather had not got wilder.

So the flaw in Brook’s response?

He didn’t dispute a single one of my graphs except for one - and even that he got completely wrong.

He didn’t address once the central argument - that the world simply isn’t heating as climate change theory says it should when man’s gases are increasing every day.
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No Anglo barristers instead
Andrew Bolt
Heard it all? Then hear this:

A BARRISTER has tried to exclude Greeks from being jurors in a Victorian rape trial because of a “common misunderstanding” they like anal sex.
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Pearman’s warm herring
Andrew Bolt
Graeme Pearman, global warming alarmist and academic, was asked last night on Lateline about my claims that the world hasn’t warmed over the past decade, and in fact has cooled in recent years.

His answer? Watch for the dodge and cherry-pick:

Reporter: Graeme Pearman says that the data from Britain’s Hadley Centre provides no evidence that the world is getting cooler.
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Exaggerators: IPCC accused by its own
Andrew Bolt
IPCC external reviewer Dr Madhav Khandekar says the UN body has exaggerated the costs of global warming:

Using unpublished work to bolster claims of escalating economic costs while ignoring peer reviewed studies which document otherwise is an unacceptable and unscientific practice…
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BEST STORY YOU’LL NEVER READ
Tim Blair
Back in February, the New York Times ran an article suggesting romantic involvement between Presidential candidate John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman. Considering how slight was the evidence, it’s surprising even the Times gave the story space.

Yet the same newspaper – and many other newspapers across the US – won’t mention a far juicier current sex scandal involving former Democrat vice-presidential candidate John Edwards and alleged “filmmaker” Rielle Hunter (birth name: Lisa Druck).
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WORKERS CLUMSY
Tim Blair
Reuters reports:
An explosion in a Hamas training camp in the Gaza Strip injured four militants on Tuesday, Palestinian security sources said.

The Islamist group did not blame anyone for causing the blast at a base near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, and local residents said it may have been related to a work accident.
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INEXPERIENCE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN
Tim Blair
An ideal VP for Barack Obama:
Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has told close associates that he has had “very serious” conversations with Sen. Barack Obama about joining the Democratic presidential ticket ...

Kaine remains popular in Virginia, but he has had trouble dealing with Republicans and has no single defining achievement to point to on the campaign trail.
Popular but non-achieving; Kaine almost out-qualifies alleged prayer-leaker Obama himself. Why, the only better running mate would be media-proof John Edwards.
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ONE THOUSAND STORES ERASED
Tim Blair
According to the SMH, Starbucks operates ...
... more than 16,000 stores around the world ...

But times are tough for the once-omnipresent coffee chain. Only eight paragraphs later:
Starbucks operates more than 15,000 coffee shops around the world.
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PROBLEM FIXED
Tim Blair
Warmenist czar Ross Garnaut predicts:
“South Australia will be hit harder than other parts of Australia if we don’t fix the problem,” Prof Garnaut told reporters in Adelaide ...
Cue the coldening:
The city’s coldest July night since 1982 saw three flights delayed at Adelaide Airport this morning due to ice on the planes’ wings.
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BAGMAN
Tim Blair
“I’ve told a lot of people that I’m trying to save the plastic bag,” says Stephen L. Joseph. “They look at me with horror.”
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UNSELLABLE CARS SOLD SOMEHOW
Tim Blair
The Washington Post reports from Songjiang:
Nodding his head to the disco music blaring out of his car’s nine speakers, Zhang Linsen swings the shiny, black Hummer H2 out of his company’s gates and on to the spacious four-lane road ...

“In China, size matters,” says Zhang, the 44-year-old founder of a media and graphic design company. “People want to have a car that shows off their status in society. No one wants to buy small.”

There are now more Buicks—the venerable, boat-like American luxury car of years past—sold in China than in the United States.
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BABY STASI
Tim Blair
Hey, kids! Are climate crimes being committed in your house? Perhaps your uncles, aunts or friends from school are climate criminals.

It’s time to fight back, children. It’s time for ... the Climate Cops! Hit that link to join Skye, Will, Oscar, K’eyush and Poochie in their hunt for bad boys.